Battlestations: Midway Preview

Planes, subs and boats are included, and each features complex controls.

Persevere, and you eventually start to get the hang of things to some degree. You might learn to use the map for example, and how to issue directional commands to your units so that your boats actually leave the harbour before they get destroyed by the enemy, and your planes no longer just fly in aimless circles around your carrier. This behaviour is apparently intentional, as the aircraft automatically assume a 'patrol' mode to protect the ship unless otherwise instructed, which makes sense, but is a tad annoying when you've just unleashed four patrols of aircraft that you want to be mounting a devastating attack on an enemy airfield - "Fly my pretties!" - only to find them instead simply circling round and round your ship in formation like a really dull version of the Red Arrows.

Yes, over time, you might get the hang of juggling the various units under your command: launching aircraft from your carrier then switching to the map to send them on a bombing mission, before seamlessly taking charge of a destroyer, bringing her about (ships are always girls you know, because they're streamlined, and, er, packed with guns) firing a broadside at an enemy cruiser, then switching to your boatyards and building two cruisers of your own, before deftly switching back to your aircraft in time to assume control of the lead plane and mount a devastating bombing run against an enemy installation. Note that I said you might do this... because it's equally likely that you'll faff around with the menus for launching aircraft from your carrier for far too long, with the result that you switch to your destroyer just in time to witness it plunging beneath the waves in flames, before getting stuck on yet more menu screens in the boatyard figuring out which ships to build while your brave flyboys get blown out of the sky well before they get anywhere near their intended targets. Top tip here: although you can just send your units into battle and let the AI handle the combat for you, if you do this, you will almost always lose. Despite some top-notch AI for your units, the game's designed so that you need to actually play an active part in proceedings.

Perhaps I'm being unfair. Perhaps I'm just a little bitter because it seemed that the other journos at the preview event got more tutoring than me from the development team. But one thing's for sure, this is NOT a game you can just jump straight into and blast away at, it requires more than a little effort to be expended in order to get anywhere at all with it, and to master it you may well need to graft on another brain. Should you persevere though, and find that you do gradually get the hang of things, then - although you'll likely never achieve the same scary level of knowledge about the craft in the game as the dev team have - commanding multiple different units turns out to be tremendous fun, and is certainly a lot more interesting - and way more hectic - than the gameplay would have been had this just been a normal RTS. Which is why the multiplayer is a bit of an anticlimax, really...

Up to eight players can battle online, teaming up to assume control of either American or Japanese units across a variety of different maps. As with the single-player game, each side has some key targets that must be destroyed in order to achieve victory, and their own key areas which must be defended. In the maps that were available on the demo day, we were limited to just four players, two on the American side and two the Japanese, but even with just this number, something quickly became apparent - there's a lot less for you to do in multiplayer. Playing as the Japanese side, for instance, one player controls an airfield and all the aircraft, while the other takes a shipyard and any ships it produces. As the shipyard player, this meant that I went from controlling all manner of different units, to only having to worry about four different ships, and suddenly... things seemed so very slow!

Multiplayer feels strangely simple at the moment, but it has great potential.

This isn't really a fault with the game; it's more a problem with naval warfare itself. Basically, the 'action' in the game only really kicks off once you're within firing range of your targets, while the rest of the time is basically spent... well, sailing! This is fine when you've got aircraft to command too, as can spend your spare time sending fast moving fighters and bombers zooming across the map into battle, but when all you've got is ships to worry about, well, it's a little bit boring to be honest. Conversely, when you're the player controlling just the aircraft, it's still not that great. Why? Well, because unfortunately, this game being big on realism, the aircraft aren't incredibly durable. Just one shot from a flak gun can bring down your plane, and while the aircraft are a lot faster moving than the ships, it's still a pain to fly them all the way across the map, only to have them blown out of the sky mere seconds after they get within range of a target.

Those perceptive types amongst you will have noted that I'm being fairly contrary: I'm criticising the game first of all for being too complex, and then again for being too simplistic! So it's probably worth making it clear that this is just a preview. Hopefully once the game's finalised, the single-player mode will ease you into the combat in such a way that you can easily learn how to control each unit individually before you're challenged with the bigger fleets (or maybe the game will come bundled with that spare brain that I mentioned earlier?) And maybe the multiplayer mode comes into its own once you know the different units well enough to maximise their performance... although I'd still recommend that the development team at Eidos tweaks things a little to give each participant in multiplayer mode control of both air and sea units, because multiple-unit control is after all one of the main selling points of the whole thing. If this happens, then what you'll have on your hands is an action/strategy game that will no doubt thrill war gamers, but might not necessarily be to the tastes of those who prefer their video games to be less cerebral and more straight-out shooting. Full marks to Eidos for trying to offer gamers something a little different than what we're used to though...!