Pacific Storm

[alanschu]

I saw this when IGN was talking about the big upcoming PC games. I hadn't heard of it, but I think WW2 naval combat is cool, so I looked into it a bit more. It's a neat looking game with the US versus Japan in the Pacific.

 

There was a demo at Fileplanet, and gave it a try. It was actually quite fun. The game has 3 layers to it, there's a strategic map, where you expand your empire, build bases, build infrastructure, new ships, do research, refits, and all that jazz.

 

There's also the tactical map, which is essentially a naval RTS. You direct forces (or you can let the AI do it. In the smaller scale battles it seemed okay, if perhaps a bit too aggressive with one of my destroyers who went rampaging in to combat, despite the Yamato BB punching holes in things from afar!

 

And there's also the "in the action" part of the game. In the tactical combat area, if you want to jump into a plane, you can! It's actually pretty straight forward, and a lot of fun. Running a torpedo bomber as a destroyer was spraying 20 mm AA guns in my direction was good times. It had some quirks with my dual analog controller (wasn't up for digging out my joystick), but the keyboard commands worked fine. Stick work with the arrow keys, rudders, bomb doors, flaps, etc done with the lower left letters of the keyboard. Need to see how it works with my joystick though. You can also jump into a ship, but only AA guns (though you could still be better than a rookie crew!).

 

 

Here's some pics from the first couple of training missions:

 

An unlucky destroyer meets a battleship

 

 

Shooting on the now escortless Transport!

 

 

A lucky shot hits an ammo hold. Boom! Instadeath

 

 

The Yamato unleashes a salvo (with the sinking psycho destroyer beside me. )

 

 

 

 

The grand campaign actually looks pretty deep. An interesting thing is that you have to take care of logistics. You need to build that transport fleet so you can stock Pearl Harbour with goods and operate out of Hawaii. You'll also need them to ferry goods back to the mainland (though America has a strong economy...this is probably more important for Japan).

 

R&D looks pretty cool as well. Lots of useful stuff like SONAR and RADAR developments. You can also alter history a bit by bringing in Jet Fighters. Looks like there's a bit of "fantasy" in there as well, with you being able to have the opportunity to build some early cruise missile that get fired from heavy bombers. Though the tech requirements are pretty insane. Need high tech radars and gyroscopes and whatnot. As you get new technologies, you can modify current designs (alas, it does not seem like you can design a whole new ship, just variants of existing types. Though the level of customization is pretty in depth, the Iowa class Battleship will still always look like an Iowa Class Battleship, even if you have tweaked it out like crazy. Probably done for modelling sakes and whatnot). So you can have a variety of builds for your ships, opting for choices in cost versus effectiveness. Since the Hull types are static, it does allow you to refit any ship with a design for that particular hull. You can also tweak out ammo configurations so that your bombers are using ship busting AP bombs and whatnot. Or some of the later rockets and cruise missiles

 

I even saw an option to refit the Essex class Carrier with a SAM Site (though, again, my tech was way, way, way far away).

 

It just went Gold in Germany, and apparently it's slated to go soon in America. If you're a naval warfare buff, I suggest giving the demo a try. It's remarkably in depth.

 

If I had to pick a game, it's style seems to remind me of Total War, but on water with thousands of tons of steel.

Edited September 5, 2006 by alanschu