Reviewed: April 5, 2007
Reviewed by: John DeWeese

Publisher
Eidos Interactive

Developer
Eidos Interactive

Released: January 30, 2007
Genre: Action-Strategy-Simulation
Players: 1-8
ESRB: Teen

8
8
8
7
8.0

System Requirements

No, the latest strategy title from Eidos Interactive is for anyone who loves to blow up WW II ships and planes, or anyone who has played way too many games of Battleship and Axis & Allies. In a genre either dominated by overly-realistic simulations, Battlestations: Midway is the first game I’ve played in a long time that offers a perfect mix of heart-pounding arcade action and interesting real-time strategy.

Battlestations: Midway allows you to experience the War in the Pacific from every angle. One moment you’re in command of a F4F Wildcat fighter squadron battling it out high over the South Pacific with a flight of Japanese Zeros. The next minute you’re unleashing a devastating artillery barrage from the deck of a battle cruiser. Suddenly, you’ve switched perspectives once again and now you’re trying to set up the perfect torpedo run as a submarine commander.

You can control the battle from the strategic map and let the AI do the fighting. Or you can take control of any plane, ship, or sub at your disposal and fight from a first-person view. History buffs will be happy to play one of 60 faithfully recreated American, British, and Japanese units. At the same time Battlestations: Midway is also “casual gamer” friendly, easy to pick up and enjoy. If there is one major complaint with the game, it’s that the single-player campaign and challenge missions are over far too quickly.

The good news is this game also offers plenty for RTS and arcade lovers alike. The trick to winning in is balancing your fleet at the admiral level while micromanaging key units. The strategic map looks like a WW II nautical chart and shows the location of all of your units and any detected enemy units. You can spot battleships a long ways away but enemy subs remain invisible until they enter your sonar range. While in strategic mode, you can order various units to attack or set up defensive combat patrols. You can also assign ships to a formation – pretty handy for creating a screen of destroyers to protect your flagships.

But click on any unit and suddenly you’re in the captain’s or pilot’s chair, making individual decisions about unit speed, direction, and what weapons to use on the bad guys. Many missions will have you hoping back and forth between strategic and first-person mode, especially if you’re commanding a carrier. More than once I’ve found myself giving orders to a bomber squadron on the other side of the map, only to realize I needed to take control of my fighter escorts before an enemy bogey slips through and sends my flat-top to the bottom.

All units have simple controls, almost to the point where Battlestations: Midway becomes an arcade game. Using the mouse and keyboard you can basically maneuver, toggle between several weapons systems, and blast the beejeezus out of the enemy. If you’re ship is damaged, you can also order your crew to put out fires or repair holes below the waterline, which makes for an interesting mini-game of “can you keep this tin can floating?” On the minus side, aircraft can be tough to control with just the mouse. More than once I landed in the drink because I couldn’t pull out of a dive bomb attack or strafing run in time. I highly recommend a joystick setup if you’re really want to get the most out of being a pilot.

Since you can’t be everywhere at once, it’s a good thing the AI is competent at controlling your units in combat. You can set the AI to act defensively or aggressively, as well as give orders to use limited torpedoes or stick to the unlimited firepower of machine guns and artillery. I found that on the regular difficulty setting, my AI-controlled fighter squadrons and ships performed pretty well in a firefight.

But the computer is far from perfect and there are several situations where you’ll want to take direct control. Bombers tend to do less damage if you’re not directing their attack runs and the lifespan of an AI-controlled sub is painfully short. Yet I found my biggest AI hang-ups happened in strategic mode. Plane squadrons would sometimes refuse to land after repeatedly being ordered to do so, while ships would sometimes collide when I changed the layout of a fleet formation.

The game’s tutorial drags on forever but by the end you’ll be more than ready for the fun of the single player campaign. You play the role of Lt. Henry Walker, a young naval officer whose first command is a PT boat during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Walker will go on to play a key role in several battles and skirmishes leading up to the decisive battle of Midway.

The campaign missions are well designed and offer interesting objectives. You’ll get the chance to defend a Filipino naval station from attack by a Japanese invasion force; provide covering fire while Marines storm an enemy beachhead; and control an aircraft carrier in the Battle of the Coral Sea. Early in the campaign you’ll even pilot a PT boat alongside John F. Kennedy himself. The only downside is the campaign is way too short for a PC title – you can easily finish it in about 6-8 hours.

If you want to continue playing solo you can try the ship, sub, and plane challenges. To give you a feeling of how tough these missions are, the “easiest” ship challenge puts you in charge of a Japanese battleship trying to escape an ambush. If commanding a battleship sounds easy, keep in mind the Americans and British are hunting you with three battleships of their own, plus countless destroyers and cruisers.

In Multiplayer mode you can choose from up to 9 different maps, with up to four players on each side. At the beginning of a mission, you select either a flotilla of ships or in some cases an airfield or shipyard to control. Once all the units under your control are destroyed, you’re out of the game but can still watch the action from your teammates’ perspectives. Missions range from small skirmishes between destroyers and PT boats to the “Clash of The Monsters” scenario, which features a bunch of battleships and cruisers blowing each other to smithereens.

While the action is just as fun and frantic in a group game, I did find some annoying features with the multiplayer UI. The team chat function is overly complicated compared to other RTS titles. Also, it would help if your controllable units on the strategy map were a different color than your teammates – too often I found myself having to click through a cluster of ships and planes until I found the ones I directly commanded.

The game’s physics are also top notch. It’s a visual treat to watch artillery rounds splash geysers of water all around your ship or witness a torpedo salvo explode on impact. The view from a fighter cockpit may not compare to the latest flight sim but can still be breathtaking. Fire animations also look great – you’ll come to love seeing big billowing clouds of diesel smoke pouring from the deck of a doomed enemy ship or watching telltale flames engulf the engines of a dying plane.

Yet there are two areas where I feel the graphics could be improved. One is definitely the South Pacific background, which gets monotonous after awhile. More atmospheric details such as rain or fog would be appreciated, although at least in the air you can experience what it’s like to have to fight in cloud cover. The other problem area is character animation. Sailors moving along the decks of a ship look stiff and barely lifelike, while pilots appear as mannequins stuffed into their cockpits. But even worse are the campaign cutscenes, where the characters have exaggerated facial expressions and make hand gestures like robots. On the plus side, the campaign movies offer excellent action sequences.

Sound effects are as realistic as the game’s visuals. You can definitely tell from audio cues if a torpedo has been fired nearby or if a depth charge has been dropped right above your head. Voice acting is a little bit of a mixed bag. The voice actor playing Lt. Walker sounds like a Junior ROTC ensign. This isn’t such a problem in the early part of the campaign, but I just can’t take him seriously issuing orders to the entire fleet at Midway. Fortunately, other American crew voices are much better. The Japanese voices all sound believable – the only problem being everything is uttered in Japanese. While this provides immersion it also makes it tough to tell if your crew’s excited about shooting down a plane or panicked that the engine room is on fire.

My biggest complaint with this game is the lack of a map editor or sandbox mode – why must I play out the same scenarios over and over, no matter how well designed? While the game offers a good amount of content by console game standards, computer RTS fans may feel a little slighted. Hardcore naval fans may find the game too easy – sub warfare is a total joke compared to say the Silent Hunter series. But despite these shortcomings I recommend buying Battlestations: Midway at full retail price, especially if you’re a big WW II fan.

The only thing keeping this game from having a top score is its lack of single player content (at least by PC standards) and some buggy issues with multiplayer. But otherwise this is a really solid game that combines both first-person and strategic gameplay flawlessly. If you have any interest in being a hero in the Pacific Theater or simply love blasting away bogeys by the boatload, Battlestations: Midway is a direct hit.