Battlestations: Midway
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Posted March 19th, 2007 at 2:55am
by Devin Kent
Once you’ve got your pieces moving to your satisfaction, you can take over a ship and really kick a lot of ass. You have a number of weapons at your disposal, depending on the ship: AA guns, machine guns, artillery, torpedoes, and depth charges. If you’re using an aircraft carrier, you’ll also be able to launch fighters, dive bombers, and torpedo bombers. You’ll have to use every weapon at your disposal as effectively as possible to do well. A destroyer facing a cruiser will be crushed by the cruiser’s range advantage, so you’ll have to use another cruiser or planes to take it down, or you just waste units fruitlessly.
The main campaign is quite difficult even on the lowest difficulty setting, and ramps up quickly in the higher levels. If that’s not quite hard enough for you, there are ship, plane, and submarine challenge missions. These missions are incredibly hard, requiring multiple tries and a very good grasp of the game mechanics. The game also offer hidden objectives, which you must explore to find. No information is given on these objectives except how many there are for each mission. These objectives are insanely hard to find and do and it will require multiple play-throughs of the game to find them all.
Multiplayer
Battlestations: Midway includes a very strong multiplayer portion. Up to 8 players–4 on the side of the US, 4 on the side of Japan–can compete in a variety of missions. Some are only for planes, others are only for ships, but most include a mix of air and sea units. You can even control ground-based units like airfields. The multiplayer games are always hectic and animated, with all 4 players trying to talk at once and coordinate strategy. If you can’t get the full compliment of 8 players, each player simply controls more ships. 1 on 1 battles offer their own brand of entertainment, as each player tries to control a staggeringly large fleet of ships.
Graphics
This is one of those games that is big on gameplay and short on graphics. Some things look good and there is a lot of detail–seamen walking around on ships’ decks and trucks driving around in bases are good examples of this–but for the most part there’s nothing to write home about. The islands that dot the seascape are just mottled green and brown lumps, and the textures for the ships are low resolution. Even the sea itself is boring: just a slightly rippled sheet of dingy blue. Underwater it looks even worse. When you dive beneath the waves with a sub, sunbeams are displayed slanting through the water. These are apparently independent of where the sun actually is, and look awful. On the other hand, the cinematics are very well done. Seeing a large naval battle in full CG glory is wonderful to look upon.
Sound
I had absolutely no problems with the sound. Radio chatter, explosions, ship sounds, plane engines, everything was dead-on and sounded good. There are even some cameos from famous Navy men like JFK, who appears in his famous PT-109 during the game’s opening missions. A little more ambient noise would have been nice to take away the monotony during travel, but other than that you can expect a great aural experience.
Summary
Battlestations: Midway is a great game, but a hard one, and it’s definitely not for everyone: if you like strategy but not action, or vice versa, you will have a hard time playing. If you’re looking for a game that mixes both, and combines it with great gameplay, a ton of replayability, and a good multiplayer experience, you can’t go wrong.
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