Battlestations: Midway

This is one of the much more recent games on GameTap, from circa Januray 2007, and I had only vaguely heard of it. Well, lo and behold, it's a World War II game. I haven't played nearly enough of those in the past few years. But wait! This one is different! You never even play as a footsoldier or infantry. The entire game consists of commanding battleships, submarines, and planes, fighting the japanese in the pacific. As far as I know, you don't even fight any germans. Certainly dogfighting sims are nothing new, and there have been a few weak stabs at battleship and submarine command, but I have to say, this is the first game I've seen to put each one together into a cohesive whole. It essentially pulls it off well, except a few minor issues. It even manages to stick in some RTS gameplay which feels pretty good if simple. While the concept seems pretty original, the gameplay for the most part isn't. It might feel unique, however, if you've never played a little game I like to call "the best Star Trek game ever." You might know it as Star Trek: Bridge Commander. More on that in a second.

I'll start with the plane combat because it's definitely my favorite. I'll admit I'm not a veteren of the flight combat genre, but I've played a few in my time. As a stand-alone game, the flight combat would have been pretty good if a little simple for some flight sim enthusiasts. The enemy planes have a circle in front of their line of movement to show you where to shoot if you want to hit them. You have machine guns and sometimes a few types of bombs (just one per plane though). No missiles; it was WWII after all. The reason this part of the game is my favorite is that it's the most actual action you're going to see in this game. The ships and subs move at a pretty slow pace, which makes sense considering how big they are and the fact that it's supposed to be more tactical. The dogfights get pretty fun and intense though. I would have liked an interior cockpit view, as the first-person view it does offer only shows you a crosshair and nothing of your plane itself. One possible complaint is that you die pretty quickly if anything shoots at you accurately, but the reason for that is because there are dozens of planes in the sky and you can just switch to another one when you die.

In fact, you're never really dead because you can switch between anything on or over the oceans. Battleships, subs, even aircraft carriers are under your control. Let me talk first about the submarines. I love the concept. Hunt for Red October is a great movie. The idea of tactical submarine command with sub-to-ship combat and sub-to-sub combat is an awesome idea and I wish a game really came along to do it right. The sub gameplay in Midway is interesting. It feels almost like a stealth game where you have to sneak around sniping at ships with your torpedoes (which are really hard to hit with by the way). Unfortunately, at any depth except pretty much the lowest one - where your hull starts to implode from the pressure - any enemy ship can spot you with sonar and hit you with depth charges. You also have to surface for air a lot. And you don't move very fast. If you get into the middle of an enemy fleet, you're gunna have to go too low to shoot them if you want to survive, and you'll probably end up surfacing right in the middle of them for oxygen and getting killed. The sub combat is HARD. There is a certain skill to it, though, which I do not yet possess, and if I get good it might be a bit more fun, but it just feels too awkward for me to really get into. You sneak around deep underwater trying not to get detected, with very little chance to attack or fight at all. It can be exciting, sure, to keep watching the ships above you and hope they don't send a depth charge your way, but I just don't get that satisfaction of blowing stuff up.

Here's where the battleships come in. Here, also, is where Bridge Commander comes in, because if you're familar with that game, you'll be familiar with the ship combat in Midway. Except the ships in Midway are a lot simpler to control and with fewer options for attacking or movement. You slowly lumber around shooting artillery and torpedoes at other battleships, turning broadside so you can get better shots, and commonly going to the repair screen to position repair crews when you get hit. Honestly, this type of combat was better in Bridge Commander with 3-dimensional movement and different firing arcs for your phasers which had to recharge. And shield zones. And you could actually command your tactical officer to make different maneauvers and firing patterns, and auto-target. In Midway, you can tell them to attack a target, or guard a target, or follow a target. That's about it. It's not bad, just not nearly as good as BC. In fact, I'm getting all nastalgic for that game now.

How do these elements all come together? In an RTS style map view. You can select your ships, planes and subs, and give orders to attack, move, guard, or whatever. Actually, that's basically it. And once they destroy their target, they'll just sit there waiting for a new order. At any time of course you can go in and control a unit directly, which is what makes this game different from a normal battlefield-style game or any RTS. You command the fleet, and you're also every gunner and pilot in that fleet. It's a fun experience, and I hear the multiplayer is crazy good. Too bad it goes through that idiocy called Gamespy. The bad thing about this game? Not nearly enough action unless you treat it as an RTS/arcade-dogfighting game. If you treat it as an RTS, it isn't nearly deep enough or fast enough. If you treat it as a dogfighting game, it's fun but not very complicated nor accurate. This really is a case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, though, and I do like this game. It's too bad the cutscenes (which are SKIPPABLE! Look, see that, Operation Flashpoint? You can SKIP THROUGH CUTSCENES!) are so corny. Yeah, the Japanese pilot looked at a picture of his family before bombing Pearl Harbor. I'm supposed to feel sympathy even though he's viewed as the bad guy. Look, we're all human beings really. What a touching and insightful message.

No, really, if I want an insightful philosophical message, I'll go read a book (preferable Dune).