Pacific Storm is a real-time strategy game that focuses on the Pacific theater of operations during World War II. The game can be played from both the U.S. and Japanese sides in two campaigns, which range from the historical 1941-1945 war to a more balanced campaign. There are also some stand-alone, mission-type battles with historical and interesting "what if" scenarios.

Unlike such games as Blitzkrieg, in which one is spared of resource management (aka "dirt farming") and can focus on fighting a war, Pacific Storm requires a great deal of player input in order to play. What starts as a promising military career in leading the U.S. or Japanese naval force quickly breaks down into a clerical micromanagement job that will require several hours of training before you can even see any action. It turns out that Pacific Storm demands managing both industrial (finances, oil production, metal supply) and war logistics (distributing soldiers, building bases) on a more strategic level, thus overshadowing the more exciting tactical aspects of the game. At first, I was patiently investing time in learning the mechanics of the game, but I soon started realizing that my return on investment was not producing expected dividends. I simply was not having fun.

After managing the war effort akin to the levels found in actual war departments, the tactical engagements appear bland, slow and overall disappointing. Pacific Storm tries to accomplish too much with too little. The 3-D graphics engine is way out of date with sparse details when it comes to rendering ships and airplanes. It all looks unfinished and cheap. The islands look like piles of sand with little houses peppered all over the place. The main fact is that Pacific Storm’s 3-D engine needs further optimization as it ran rather slow on my fairly robust PC. I had the game updated with the latest patch prior to playing the game. Add to this poor artificial intelligence, broken path finding, lack of mission logic and frequent game crashes, and you will be cussing up a storm playing Pacific Storm. The audio is repetitive, and the introductory military music is annoying. At least one can turn it off unlike other annoyances.

I tend to overlook the importance of audio-visual elements if the gameplay is deep and engaging. Unfortunately, Pacific Storm was a pure exercise in frustration. There were few sporadic promising moments, such as the instant-action feature in which a player can man a .50-caliber machine gun atop the USS Colorado during the Pearl Harbor attack. This poorly executed attempt to mix first-person action in an aforementioned strategic Gordian knot does not work in Pacific Storm while it does work for such other games as Battle of Britain II.

The multiplayer mode allows single battle fights with seven other players, cooperative play with a buddy or some instant fighter-pilot action. In theory, it all sounds good, but finding someone online to play with or against is the main challenge. Either the servers were down, or nobody is playing this game. I believe that the latter is true, judging by the low quality of gameplay witnessed in the single-player experience.

Generally, I try to be fair to game developers, since I know a lot of work goes into developing a game. Sadly, Lesta Studio should have simplified Pacific Storm instead of trying to throw at us an encyclopedia of war effort along with a kitchen sink. Being overambitious while offering underdeveloped features with a general lack of focus has sealed the fate of many games. Pacific Storm is one of those games.