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Heroes of the Pacific

We never really can get enough of WWII, can we? Regardless, we’ve seen just about every story, conflict, and spin on the war in video game form and the war is beginning to show its age in the gaming world. Still though, we just love shooting those Nazis I guess and in Heroes of the Pacific you get to take the battle to the air, but not above the skies of Germany, rather to the Pacific. Focused as a more arcadey flight game much like Crimson Skies rather than being a heavy simulation-based title, Heroes of the Pacific offers up an easily accesible title with a few cool surprises.

The game’s story revolves areound ace pilot Crowe and his younger brother. Signing up for service together, they’re both at the infamous bombing of Pearl Harbor. Hurrying to their planes to make it out alive, this section of the game serves more as eye-candy and a tutorial, resulting in you getting out of there and your brother falling victim to the Japanese. This serves as the underlying focus of the game as you control Crowe through several historical missions taking place throughout the Pacific during the war.

While the fights themself were destructive, leaving little chance for either side’s pilots to make it out alive, the game’s default difficulty makes the conflict a cakewalk. We found that playing the game for the first time on the third difficulty setting gives a much better play as you’ll find things are just difficult enough should you not be all too familiar with flying games. This is in line with the game’s overall emphasis on general fun, rather than strict simulation of flight.

Progressing through the campaign, you’ll gain access to several different types of aircraft, varying from light, swift combat planes to bulky, slow bombers. Each plane has distinguishable characteristics heavily weighing towards its overall value in the game so it isn’t possible to use just one super plane for every scenario, allowing for a bit more depth and strategy to your pre-mission planning. Utilizing the bombers for ground placement of ordinance is quite the treat, displaying a green targetting icon on-screen when your bomber is at optimum altitude and speed, marking a clean bombing trajectory.

There are a slightly hefty sum of unlockables for you to uncover such as planes, missions, and historic footage. Planes are varied, allowing you to pilot both American and Japanese fighters, with which you can also take online. The unlockable missions are based around the historic fights that took place in the region, with more focus on the realism, presenting historically-accurate missions and odds. These are fun to play, but due to their lack of volume, only hold minimal value.

Taking the game online is really fun, allowing you to brag with your unlocked fighters in several different game modes. Aside from requisite free-for-all mode, there are 2 different team-based forms of gameplay. Capture the Flag pits two teams against eachother, vying for the opposing teams flag, which upon colleciton they must take back to their own in order to score a point. This is run-of-the-mill multiplayer though, so thankfully there’s a more entertaining mode in Scratch One Flat Top. This mode pits two teams against eachother, but each team has one carrier ship to defend. Balancing defense and offense here is key, and this mode provides many close calls and tense battles.

Online play is really where the biggest difference between the Xbox and PS2 versions is made most evident, aside from the graphics. Online play with the Xbox version is smooth with a larger core community of players at your disposal. During gameplay online with the PS2 version, there was constant slow down when all 8 players in the room were on-screen. Aside from that, the PS2 version loads longer and features less dazzling explosions and consistent frame rate issues offline. These aren’t issues that will make the game unplayable, but they’re definately noticeable in comparrison.

Heroes of the Pacific offers up some fun dog-fighting action, cool bombing missions, and some unique online play. While the sum of all of the title’s parts provides adequate entertainment, the game’s campaign is a bit on the short side and online play is only going to appeal to those with jet fuel in their blood. More of a title to rent rather than to own, Heroes of the Pacific does a good job of taking historic material and bringing new life to it through fun, arcade-like combat. While the Xbox version clearly outweighs the PS2 version through more solid graphics and a consistently better play online, both versions still manage to present similar situation after another without boring the player to sleep.

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Tags: Heroes of the Pacific

Posted by David Hinkle on Nov 4th, 2005 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews, Xbox Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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