Battlestations: Midway
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Posted March 19th, 2007 at 2:55am
by Devin Kent
War is hell, but it makes a great video game. Any game that allows you to blow stuff up, shoot people, sink ships, and scream curse words at your foes, all in the name of patriotism, is just fine in my book. Now you can do it on the high seas, too.
What It Is
Battlestations: Midway couldn’t decide if it wanted to be an action game or a strategy game, so it ended up being both. One minute you’ll be carefully positioning your units on the tactical map, like pieces on a chess board, and the next you’ll be controlling a dive bomber as it screams towards an enemy ship. It all takes place during World War II, starting with Pearl Harbor and ending with the Battle of Midway.
Gameplay
To start the game, you have to go through the excruciatingly long and boring tutorials. I say “have to” because this not a game you can figure out by experimenting with different buttons. The controls are difficult and the game’s mechanics require some explanation. Unfortunately, the tutorials move at a snail’s pace, and there’s no way to speed up the narrator. Even then, there’s quite a lot of detail that’s up to you to find out. The tutorial only tells you how to move and shoot. There are no details on how naval battles actually work, and no hints on what weapons work against what ships. You simply have to experiment.
Once you’ve suffered through the tutorials, you can get into the meat of the game’s campaign. You are Henry Walker, just starting a tour of duty in Pearl Harbor. As you guide your PT boat (think a speedboat with AA guns and torpedoes–sweet) through the harbor, Japanese planes mount their infamous attack. This is one of the greatest openings to a game I’ve ever seen. The battle is incredibly hectic, with planes screaming overhead, explosions all around, and AA fire dotting the sky, all with a background of constant radio chatter. Your role in the fight is small, simply taking out Japanese planes with your machine gun and depth charging a submarine. As the game progresses you will be promoted to higher ranks, giving you access to bigger ships and, eventually, fleets to control. You will even get the chance to pilot planes when you’re given command of an aircraft carrier.
Commanding a battleship or a fleet of ships is, however, precisely as hard as it sounds. Battlestations: Midway was released on the PC and Xbox 360 simultaneously, and suffers from it slightly in the control scheme. As the commander, you have to move your ship, fire your weapons, scan the horizon for enemy boats, planes, or submarines, and control however many other ships are in your fleet. With a full keyboard and mouse, multitasking would be no problem. With the limited buttons on a console controller, however, I found myself constantly hitting the wrong button, even after playing the game for a very long time.
Once you get over the controls, you can dive into the game. You’ll spend a lot of time on the tactical map. This shows the layout of all the units on the battlefield, from ships and planes to ground-based structures like airfields, hangars, and artillery placements. You can order your units to move, attack, or guard other units, as well as switch to any unit under your command and control it directly. You don’t need to micromanage, however, as your units are smart enough to hold their own. They will always do better with if you control them, but if you set them a task you can safely assume they will carry it out. You will have to constantly check them, though, because the game provides no indication that they’ve completed their mission. I often got involved in a battle, only to finish and find that a number of my units were sitting idle. You can set units to move and fire at their own discretion, which ameliorates this to some degree, but I would have preferred more up-to-date information on what my men were doing.
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