Heroes of the Pacific
Boy, we sure were fond of our racial slurs back in the day.
Published: October 26, 2005
World War II games have been done to freakin’ death. It’s the king of the FPS heap right now, despite us getting what seems like a couple of them a year, but there is one area that’s still untapped, and indeed a genre as a whole that hasn’t seen much action on the PS2: the semi-historical flight game.
It used to be a staple of the PC, the WWII arcade flight game, and it was a good one too. I logged more hours with Sierra’s Aces series than nearly any other action game at the time thanks to a perfect mix of great controls (with the arrow keys, no less) and a whole lot of basic dogfighting and strafing runs.
Heroes of the Pacific has fair controls, and a heeeeell of a lot of dogfighting, but it’s also horribly uneven, difficulty-wise, and often makes you repeat the same bits across multiple missions, all while struggling with a flight model that’s not quite as solid as it could be. Ever since Sky Odyssey hit, it’s been the flight game I hold all others to, if not in terms of content than at least the controls. HotP is certainly no Sky Odyssey.
It does pull off a decent blend of historical footage, familiar but still-welcome situations and lots and lots of shooting down Japanese and German planes. Literally, you’ll fell thousands of them by the time you’re done with the game, which does tend to throw the whole historical accuracy out the window, seeing as you could have ended the war single-handedly if you were that good, but it’s made worse by these lofty accomplishments being made plain by your commanders.
If you happen to only kill 99 of those 100 planes out there, well, buddy boy, I guess you’ll just have to start all over, and get berated while you’re at it. At least gunning down planes isn’t tough, since even leading them is made simple by your target turning red when you’ve nose around enough to get in front with your shots. Even if it wasn’t that easy, you’d have plenty of practice with all those restarts.
This is part of the game’s biggest problem, for as much of it is some solid flying, there’s a painful amount of monotony and redundancy in things. The game does offer some wingman controls mapped to the d-pad, but it’s basic at best. You’re given the option to pick either Arcade or Professional controls, but the latter is far too squirrelly to be of any real use, and the former doesn’t quite give you the feeling of agility that you’d hope. Arcade controls are definitely better, and they’re certainly not bad, but again, after playing Sky Odyssey, it’s hard to play anything different.
These controls are important, because you’ll have to wrangle them into getting your bird into some interesting positions. Developer IR Gurus added in quite a few bombing runs to break up all the dogfighting, and for the most part they succeed. Each has their own HUD for nailing ships, usually with a twin indicator for speed and altitude to help guide you in for shots. The torpedo runs in particular are a blast, as are the huge bombing runs through the middle of flak cannon fire. That the game lets you play with fighters, dive bombers, torpedo bombers and big ass fully-loaded bombers (think B-2 here) is a nice touch.
So too is the ability to spend upgrade points based on your difficulty level towards suping up your machine. Since you’ll unlock a slew of planes but actually fly very few of them in the single-player campaign, it was a nice touch to allow boosts to performance, as well as some light configuration of the kind and angle of your guns.
The progression through the game is told by a series of pre-rendered sequences that make ample use of old stock footage and WWII poster art. You play William Crowe, one of two brothers that grew up as military brats and eventually enlisted in the Navy, Bill as a pilot and his bro as a sailor about the U.S.S. Arizona. Stationed in Pearl Harbor. On the morning of the Japanese surprise attack. Yeaaahh.
Things don’t go to well for Bill’s sibling, and he swears up and down that he’ll make everyone pay, pay by being passive-agressively being called “Japs” en masse. In fact, that word probably outnumbers every other one in the game. “Jap” is thrown around an awful lot, enough that I started getting really self-concious about halfway in because my Japanese girlfriend had been sitting in the other room most of the time.
One could probably make the argument that all that rage spilled out in the form of racial slurs, but if you’re going to get accurate about dialogue, it should probably be peppered with a few more expletives (y’know, like the ones you “get” to hear online) and the planes probably shouldn’t land via two circles rather than easing things in by hand, or machine guns with limitless ammo.
It used to be a staple of the PC, the WWII arcade flight game, and it was a good one too. I logged more hours with Sierra’s Aces series than nearly any other action game at the time thanks to a perfect mix of great controls (with the arrow keys, no less) and a whole lot of basic dogfighting and strafing runs.
Heroes of the Pacific has fair controls, and a heeeeell of a lot of dogfighting, but it’s also horribly uneven, difficulty-wise, and often makes you repeat the same bits across multiple missions, all while struggling with a flight model that’s not quite as solid as it could be. Ever since Sky Odyssey hit, it’s been the flight game I hold all others to, if not in terms of content than at least the controls. HotP is certainly no Sky Odyssey.
It does pull off a decent blend of historical footage, familiar but still-welcome situations and lots and lots of shooting down Japanese and German planes. Literally, you’ll fell thousands of them by the time you’re done with the game, which does tend to throw the whole historical accuracy out the window, seeing as you could have ended the war single-handedly if you were that good, but it’s made worse by these lofty accomplishments being made plain by your commanders.
If you happen to only kill 99 of those 100 planes out there, well, buddy boy, I guess you’ll just have to start all over, and get berated while you’re at it. At least gunning down planes isn’t tough, since even leading them is made simple by your target turning red when you’ve nose around enough to get in front with your shots. Even if it wasn’t that easy, you’d have plenty of practice with all those restarts.
This is part of the game’s biggest problem, for as much of it is some solid flying, there’s a painful amount of monotony and redundancy in things. The game does offer some wingman controls mapped to the d-pad, but it’s basic at best. You’re given the option to pick either Arcade or Professional controls, but the latter is far too squirrelly to be of any real use, and the former doesn’t quite give you the feeling of agility that you’d hope. Arcade controls are definitely better, and they’re certainly not bad, but again, after playing Sky Odyssey, it’s hard to play anything different.
These controls are important, because you’ll have to wrangle them into getting your bird into some interesting positions. Developer IR Gurus added in quite a few bombing runs to break up all the dogfighting, and for the most part they succeed. Each has their own HUD for nailing ships, usually with a twin indicator for speed and altitude to help guide you in for shots. The torpedo runs in particular are a blast, as are the huge bombing runs through the middle of flak cannon fire. That the game lets you play with fighters, dive bombers, torpedo bombers and big ass fully-loaded bombers (think B-2 here) is a nice touch.
So too is the ability to spend upgrade points based on your difficulty level towards suping up your machine. Since you’ll unlock a slew of planes but actually fly very few of them in the single-player campaign, it was a nice touch to allow boosts to performance, as well as some light configuration of the kind and angle of your guns.
The progression through the game is told by a series of pre-rendered sequences that make ample use of old stock footage and WWII poster art. You play William Crowe, one of two brothers that grew up as military brats and eventually enlisted in the Navy, Bill as a pilot and his bro as a sailor about the U.S.S. Arizona. Stationed in Pearl Harbor. On the morning of the Japanese surprise attack. Yeaaahh.
Things don’t go to well for Bill’s sibling, and he swears up and down that he’ll make everyone pay, pay by being passive-agressively being called “Japs” en masse. In fact, that word probably outnumbers every other one in the game. “Jap” is thrown around an awful lot, enough that I started getting really self-concious about halfway in because my Japanese girlfriend had been sitting in the other room most of the time.
One could probably make the argument that all that rage spilled out in the form of racial slurs, but if you’re going to get accurate about dialogue, it should probably be peppered with a few more expletives (y’know, like the ones you “get” to hear online) and the planes probably shouldn’t land via two circles rather than easing things in by hand, or machine guns with limitless ammo.
