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Heroes of the Pacific is a World War II flight sim (with quite an arcade slant) for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and PC that puts you into the shoes of a young US Navy pilot named William Crowe. We got to test out an 80 percent complete build of the PlayStation 2 version and are pretty confident that the game will deliver a lot of intense aerial action when it’s released this September.
The game starts at Pearl Harbour, where you must defend your air base from the Japanese naval strike force. This opening mission is no pushover, with swarms of planes involved in the attack. Right from the start the game throws more and more mission objectives at you, with barely a moment to breath. Sadly, despite your best efforts (although your skills will probably be pretty poor at this stage) the Japanese sink a boat that your brother was in and this gives you all the reason you need to continue fighting in the war.
Plane controls are tight and easy to pick up thanks to the two control schemes on offer. For anyone who wants to play the game with a more arcade feel, the ‘Arcade’ controls allow you to fly the plane as if it were a flying car, with no complex flight controls needed to manoeuvre around the sky. Choosing ‘Professional’ will make things a lot harder, but also far more authentic. The planes will now control like they would in real life, with the plane barrel rolling instead of turning like a car. This takes a lot more practice to get the hang of, but will please anyone who wants to feel like they have really earned their victories.
While you start out in a P-40C Warhawk, you unlock new planes as you progress through the single-player campaign. Later on in the game you’ll pilot dive-bombers, torpedo bombers and more. You’ll also be able to upgrade your planes’ speed, armour, agility and guns. Eventually wingmen will join you and you’ll be able to give them basic commands using the controller’s D-pad. It’s pretty basic stuff, but it feels good to be in command of a small squadron.
Gameplay is pretty straightforward, with most objectives essentially being to blow things up, but you do get a nice variety of things to do. You’ll be involved in dogfights, bombing runs, torpedo attacks, escort missions and more, attacking ground, sea and air based enemies. The game keeps things moving at a frantic pace with its challenging missions and skies full of enemy planes; at times the sky is swarming with them. While these planes didn’t have the lock-on abilities of modern fighter jets, the game lets you highlight targets and provides you with a useful radar and an arrow directing you towards your chosen target.
Visually the game is looking sharp, with plenty of planes on screen and beautiful cloud and smoke effects. Flying close to the ground will reveal some fairly rough looking textures, but this is something that affects all flight sims, so isn’t really a valid criticism of the game. The frame rate is already pretty solid and only starts to bog down during intense dogfights, but given the time left to work on the game, this will hopefully be smoothed out a little in the final release. The PC and Xbox versions of the game will probably look a little more polished, but the PlayStation 2 version is no slouch.
Heroes of the Pacific looks like it should please flight sim fans looking for a bit of aerial combat and the easy to pick up controls will appeal to newcomers to the genre. The campaign appears to be pretty lengthy and the final game will include five historical missions that are unlocked during the main campaign, plus multiplayer support via split-screen or online play with a total of eight players. We’ll bring you a full review in time for the game’s September release.
To get a better feel of the game in action, why not take a look at our two gameplay movies from the PlayStation 2 version.
Gameplay movie #1 (20mb windows media)
Gameplay movie #2 (18mb windows media)
To save either clip, right click the link and select “Save Target As…”.
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