Battlestations: Midway

Rating: M - Suitable for mature audiences 16 years and over.
Contains violence.
Genre: World War Two, Action, Strategy.
Developer: Atari.
Release Date: February 22nd.

It’s December 7th, 1941 and you’re on a PT Boat heading through the peaceful harbour waters on your way to battleship row, peacefull that is until all hell breaks loose.

Caught in the middle of Japan’s surprise attack, you have to help fend off wave after wave of aerial attacks, and then, when it seems like you only just survived you spot the unmistakable signs of a submarine prowling the waters, looking for a target that the plans missed.

That’s right, it’s sub-hunting time, and after her you go, armed with a limited supply of depth charges.

A baptism of fire Pearl Harbour may have been, but its nothing compared to what awaits you in Battlestations Midway. This is no world war two themed arcade game, this is an all encompassing action/strategy campaign for domination of the Pacific.

The early missions are really only training – though they don’t fell like training, but in war, everything is training – for the later missions when you have to really engage your brain, reflexes and skills to win battles.

So treat these early missions with respect, because the skills you learn being in control of only one aircraft/ship/submarine at a time will be invaluable later on when you have to manage an entire carrier group at Midway.

So an all-encompassing game can only excel at one thing, and with something this big, that thing would have to be strategy, right?

Wrong.

Battlestations Midway seems to get everything right. The aircraft handle like you would expect aircraft to handle in a flight combat game, the surface vessels respond how you’d expect them to handle in a battleship game, and the subs handle, well you get the picture.

So on the one hand you could look at this as three games in one, and in fact the options you get at the start menu reflect this. You can opt to jump straight into the American Pacific campaign, or try you had and some flying missions, battleship missions or submarine missions.

But it’s the campaign mode that really gets the grey matter going, as the strategy is the glue that binds all the individual components together into one mammoth experience.

Graphically, with everything that’s going on, I was expecting a below par look to the game, but in true 360 style, the graphics are awesome, with beautiful explosions and smoke effects, right down to destructible buildings on the islands, through to the liquid oceans and the water splashes on the screen when you fly too close to the water.

It’s mind numbingly awesome.

Of course there is a down side. No game is ever going to be perfect, and Battlestation Midway’s best feature is also it’ achilles’ heel. The sheer amount of gameplay means that there is some steep learning curves, and this can take time to master.

Now to a lot of people this wont seem like much of an achilles’ heel, but if you’re looking for a quick game, that isn’t going to tax your brain much, and give you non-stop carnage, then you might w ant to look else where. If, however, you want to experience warfare it it’s realest form, then look no further.

Rent or buy?
Buy it, you’ll be playing this one for some time.