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| | Genre: Strategy & War | | | Min OS X: 10.5.8 |
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Requirements: Mac OS X: 10.5.8 | CPU: 1.8 GHz Intel Processor | RAM: 2 GB | HD Space: 9 GB Graphics: 256 MB - The following cards are NOT supported: ATI X1xxx series, NVIDIA 7xxx series and Intel GMA series.Review: There haven't been many action-strategy hybrids in the game market these days. Ever since the average sales of Battlezone and the terrible sales of Battlezone II back in the day, game developers have mostly steered clear of the genre. This makes the release of the Battlestations games a pleasant surprise. They aren't quite as tactical as Battlezone, mainly focusing on pre-chosen groups of units, but they're still plenty of fun for pilots and commanders alike.Battlestations: Pacific (BP) from Feral Interactive focuses on the sea war near the start of America's entry into World War II, during the hunt for Japanese carriers in the seas of the Pacific. You can choose to play as either the United States and get a semi-historical campaign, or choose to play as the Japanese and wipe out the U.S. fleets with your doomsday fleet. Needless to say, playing as the Japanese can be loads of fun. Due to the fact that the writers of the game aren't held back by reality, there are quite a few funny touches thrown in including cameo appearances from a couple characters in Battlestations: Midway to just general classic movie caricatures. In either case, you'll find yourself controlling a wide variety of vehicles. These range from quite a few varieties of aircraft to submarines, battleships, destroyers, and carriers. Each vehicle feels significantly different, and tends to come armed with a different variety of weaponry. For example, the vastly different maneuverability and speed of the Mustang and Hellcat make the strategies for the use of either greatly different. On ships this is even more apparent, although destroyers seem a little overpowered. Every other ship is really well armored, comes with strong deck artillery, and can shoot down aircraft with ease. However, they move extremely slowly, and fall quickly to a single destroyer unloading a full wave of torpedoes into their side. The one truly unique unit is the carrier, which brings the majority of the strategy to BP. During most of the missions, you'll have to control fighter squadrons in a tactical view. When the carrier is in play, this includes launching specific types of aircraft (fighter, dive bomber, torpedo bomber, etc...), telling them to return when they're taking a beating or need to be switched out, and ordering them around from a war table style view. There's no way to order squadrons at all from the action views, so you'll find yourself spending most of your time there during the larger missions. However, the AI tends to act like an idiot when performing even simple airborne tasks, so you'll tend to find yourself taking direct control of bomber wings and fighter squadrons on the tougher difficulties. You'll often enter their pilot seat to find them firing over a plane's wings, aiming off-center on a torpedo release, or even chasing a fighter squadron when enemy bombers are about to destroy precious landing ships. If you want to do well, you're going to have to micromanage them quite a bit.
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