Battlestations: Midway

February 17,2007 -

Battlestations : Midway is set in the perspective of the American navy during World War II. Specifically, you’ll be playing through the devastating Japanese bombing at Pearl Harbor to the final blow dealt to the Japanese navy at the Battle of Midway. With this focus on the war against the Japanese, Eidos shies away from simply regurgitating the Nazi versus Allied premise that most WWII games fall under.

Along with the promised air and sea combat, Battlestations attempts to use a dramatic story to transition from one battle to the next via cutscenes before and after missions. You’ll be taking on the persona of Henry Walker, a roguish naval officer who is quickly promoted through the course of the game, enabling you to control a wider and wider variety of vessels. However, almost all of Walker’s lines are laughably clichéd and forced, failing to let the player identify with him. Walker’s character also seems a little archetypal and surreal in that he actually wants to be sent to a potential watery death. While soldiers portrayed in other WWII era games only look forward to going home to see their family and maybe a girl, Walker is always looking for a fight and complains like a candy deprived child when he's denied. The overarching theme that war destroys lives is effectively transmitted though, and saves the story from being completely unbearable.

Luckily, you can skip over the story's cutscenes, and you don’t have to put up with Walker if you don’t want to. Before you even go ahead on the single player campaign, though, you’ll definitely want to traverse the Naval Academy. The Academy is basically a tutorial that walks you step-by-grueling-step through every facet of all the different ships and planes you’ll be controlling. While it’s slow (it lasts an hour), the knowledge gained from it will be dire for managing your units in-game. Eidos is even kind enough to reward you with an achievement at the end of it. The ‘A’ button allows one to select targets and order a ship to move, and the ‘X’ is used for giving attacking commands and allowing certain freedoms like ‘free fire’ to the A.I. when the unit is not under your control. The left joystick simultaneously controls speed and direction of a unit while the right simply allows you to look around the vessel or aim weapons, and the left trigger allows you to scroll through available weapons while the right allows you to use them. The Back button sends you to the map screen where you can view all your own units as well as any enemy units spotted on radar or sonar. Some buttons, like the shoulder bumpers, have different uses depending on what unit you’re controlling, so it might take a while to fully realize every available option for each unit.

Speaking of units, there are quite a few captain's chairs and cockpits you’ll find yourself seated in throughout the game, and Eidos does a grand job of accurately tailoring controls to each one. The first unit you’ll control is the Patrol Boat, or PT boat for short. This little ship can zip around the waters quickly and make agile turns, but lacks artillery because of it. On the other hand, aircraft carriers like the USS Yorktown that make incredibly wide turns, are both unwieldy and essentially worthless in one-to-one combat. The submarines are also relatively slow, but can dive deep to avoid surface fire, and even deeper to avoid sonar detection. On top of these, you’ll get to control light cruisers, heavy cruisers, destroyers, battleships, seaports, and airfields. While this may seem like a lot, you’re never allowed to control land-based weaponry like anti-aircraft guns, which is a little disappointing. However, you can always use your own planes or onboard AA to take down those Japanese bombers. Onboard the larger vessels like destroyers and aircraft carriers you can also personally attend to damages received to weaponry, engines, maneuver, and the hull. By specifically assigning crewmen to fix engines, close leaks, extinguish fires, and repair the steering, one is able to better keep their ship in tip-top-condition, which can mean the difference between a gallant victory and an early retirement.

In the campaign, you’ll gradually control more and more of these units, starting with the aforementioned PT Boat. Like the tutorial, you’ll spend the first half of the campaign controlling single units. These missions are tedious and boring because, while some of the action is great, it’s no fun spending five minutes turning your boat or plane so that you can aim at a moving target, spending another five minutes turning again to shoot, and then moving to your next bogey. Battlestations is definitely not the impatient man’s game. After you reach about the halfway point, though, you’ll be rewarded with your first true strategic battle. This is where the difficulty level ramps up and you become much more involved. At this point, you’ll need to rapidly switch from carrier to destroyer to your torpedo bombers to your machine-gunners, to your carpet bombers and back again trying to coordinate attacks, protect vessels, and move to your next position. To do so, you’ll forget about graphics and stay in the map screen almost the entire time to get a better overall view of the action. Luckily, swapping out selected units is quick and streamlined with the directional pad. As a result of this synergy of motion, there will almost always be a unit that is in combat so that you can easily switch into a plane or destroyer whose A.I. has just moved it to face the enemy, and proceed to unleash hell. You won’t get to enjoy downing enemy aircraft from a first person view for too long though, as there will almost always be another squadron of bombers to launch, a wounded machine gunner to land, and a formation of ships to maintain.

While most of the gameplay is good, there are a few catches. The A.I. might be good at making turns, but it is just plain awful at shooting. Your torpedo bombers will constantly drop their load at the stern of a ship instead of its starboard or portside flanks, and aircraft fires in small bursts at the enemy instead of a constant stream of bullets. Thus, your units are much more effective when you are manually controlling them, which is a nice notion that should probably hold true, but it is impossible to simultaneously control all units in combat. Also, managing ship formation is a bit more of a pain than it should be. First, you need to actually tell one ship to go around another to get to its place, as the pathfinding sometimes decides that running into an ally is a great idea. While it is funny watching our little PT boat slam time and time again into our destroyer while trying to move to its other side, it’s not so funny watching the destroyer sink a little earlier because of friendly fire. Finally, it is irking to see a dive bomber initiate a dogfight shortly after you gave it a direct order to sink a cruiser because you have ‘Free Fire’ and ‘Free Move’ turned on. While a squadron should indeed be given the ability to initiate combat with the enemy automatically, a direct order by the user should always override such automatically.

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