Heroes Of The Pacific Demo: Review

No, I’m not sick of World War II games – to be honest, I don’t think I ever could be. As long as they keep varying the game type, I’m good. I think we can all agree the WWII FPS market is a little flooded, but there aren’t many (any?) really good aerial combat games. I was totally looking forward to Secret Weapons Over Normandy, especially since Michael Giacchino was announced as being the composer months before it’s release. I should have known when the soundtrack was getting more hype than the game. The flying just wasn’t that good. I loved the flying engine in Battlefield 1942, and everything else just doesn’t seem to cut it. Until now!

I was stoked from the moment I fired up the demo. The menu screens are great – styled like 1940s advertisements. Without even checking the control schema, I jumped right into a mission… had to start with Pearl Harbour. There’s three single player missions available in the demo which cover all different kinds of gameplay. The Wake Island mission is pretty cool and quite the change from the dogfights found in Pearl Harbour as you’re defending your fellow soldiers from incoming tanks and boats that are storming the island. The controls feel great – very smooth. Allowing you to use the mouse for steering with added control support from the keyboard. It’s super easy to pull off tight maneuvers while chasing down an enemy fighter without worrying about smashing into the ground.

There’s lots of super intense moments, like when you’re heading toward incoming fighters and you go through a patch of thick clouds. Only to have them clear just as you’re about to engage the enemy. The clouds are built using a particle system which has a super nice affect when you go through them and makes them look fairly realistic. Especially since you can go above, below and through them.

At this point, the only thing I have to complain about are the voice overs. I realize they’re trying to make it sound like radio banter, but it’s just annoying. Having played the missions a couple times each, they got old very fast.

I think Heroes Of The Pacific is shaping up to be a solid game and I’m even more so looking forward to it now having played the demo.

And now, I’m very pleased to deliver my first game footage via steaming (or download if you prefer) video! I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past week trying different codecs and encoding at all different bitrates to find a quality that was suitable without being an enormous file. Surprisingly enough (seriously), Windows Media proved to be the best. I really wanted to go with Flash video, but it produced the weakest results and the biggest file sizes. Anyway, enough of the tech talk. Take a couple minutes to check out a replay of the Pearl Harbour mission played by yours truly.