I'm a big war game fan. Maybe it's a sickness of some sort, but I love laying waste to digitally represented foreign armies. It doesn't matter if it's a completely tactical turn-based strategy title or a run-and-gun Call of Duty-style shooter. If it's a wargame, I always want to play it. Pacific Storm: Allies is a game that calls my wargame-genre-loving boast and delivers on a level far above anything I expected. That said... don't read this first paragraph and think I'm saying you'll love the game. There's a fairly large chance that this is too much 'game' for you...
Have I challenged your wargame libido? If I haven't, Lesta Studios sure will.
I fired up the game and went into the tutorial missions, like a good little newbie. Typically, you can tell quite a bit about a game's experience from its tutorial, so I always take quite a few notes to capture the "new player experience." With Pacific Storm: Allies, there are six different tutorials to play through, and if you want to understand what's going on, you'd better play through each one of them because this game is deep. It wasn't long before I realized that most of my notes wouldn't make it into my review simply because I couldn't keep them "overviewy" enough.
As an example, during one of the steps in the first tutorial, the game literally takes control of your mouse to show you the advanced damage indicator for a battleship unit. While this is happening, you get to watch this single unit take damage in 10 or more different locations (ALL units in the game their own unique damage model that follows the original prototype for the plane or ship.) Each of these locations have roughly 5 sub-meters detailing what TYPE of damage has been taken. Each section and system has these parameters:
It's all very impressive and very VERY complicated. Make no mistake, this is a serious war simulator, not an arcade game. If (when) the tutorials don't fully prepare you for battle, there is a 200 page manual supplied in PDF format to give you a deeper look.
Will you like this game? Well... have you ever played any war simulation board-games? The ones with 800-plus page manuals of technical specifications for each unit and all kinds of crazy terrain/weather calculations? Did all that realism make you giddy and excited? If so, you'll probably need to keep a towel handy when you play Pacific Storm: Allies. This game is definitely built to appeal to serious simulation/strategy players. When you get past all of the tutorials and manual-reading sessions and get ready to play the big game, you are presented with NUMBERS! Lots and lots of numbers. You have to deal with technology upgrades, fleet/army building, base construction, and tons of planning and preparation before you even hope to fight. You are literally planning the war in the Pacific Theatre. This game isn't all war-time. The battles are only a part of it.
Speaking of the battles, this is part of the game with which I feel that most 'average' gamers will be at home. You have your units that are controlled in a similar fashion to those in other RTS games you may have played... but as you probably expect by now, layers and layers of depth has been added. The units you're using are ones you built during the other part of the game... and don't expect to get reinforcements via Deus Ex Storyline because it's all your plans and units.
The realism stretching into the actual battles may detract a bit for some players. Big ships are hard to kill... two warships can shoot at each other for a pretty long while (in videogame terms) before one goes under. It's possible that some players will lose interest here — but the target market probably won't notice it's taking so long because they have tons and tons of damage meters to assess.
The lightest part of the game is definitely the "Direct Control" feature. At any part of the game, you can take control of any plane or ship and drive/fly/shoot as the unit rather than giving orders from "above." If you plan to do a little flying, I strongly recommend getting a joystick, as trying to fly with the keyboard is extremely difficult. Also, don't plan to jump into a fighter plane, leave your CPU controlled units behind and wipe out the entire enemy army. They'll blow you out of the sky if you do something too 'heroic.' Taking direct control is only really viable once you've laid a good battle plan and given the orders... but if and when you manage to get everything set up, there's really no other experience like sitting in a cockpit and watching your forces, that you built and deployed, who are carrying out your orders, crush your enemy.
As far as graphics and sound... it's honestly a little sub-par for today's standards. Big freaking deal. If you want to watch a movie, play Call of Duty 4... but if you're just interested in that, you're probably not the right type of gamer for this title anyway.
Seriously, I didn't sleep last night because of this game... as is usually the case, I passed the "learning" point a few minutes before I was going to quit for the night. Then the sun came up... stupid sun! I'm sending this game to my Dad. He's a bigger war-simulation nut than I am so I'll get a second layer of enjoyment from Pacific Storm: Allies — from hearing him complain about being tired!
If you like superdeep, way involved war simulations, then go... go now and pick this one up. But if you're a 'light' wargame type of player, you may not make it past the learning point and you really can't do well at the game if you aren't as excited about the pre-fight planning as the actual pew pew pew BOOM...
