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Battlestations Midway
The scene is the Pacific
Theatre of Operations, the time is World War II and the task is to win
at any costs. Battlestations Midway is one of those games that have
struck a nice balance between action and strategy, pulling it off in
such a way that gamers from either side of the fence should be
pleasantly surprised.
Battlestations Midway puts you in the boots of Henry
Walker and his rise from lowly recruit beginnings to eventually taking
over the command of the largest battleship on the pacific. The game
moves along at a decent pace and is varied enough that it will keep
gamers busy for quite some time.
The range of vehicles in this game is amazing and you
have the opportunity to control all of them, ranging from aircraft, to
submarine to ship, all the whilst making sure you are on top of the
battle as a whole. The way to do this is with your tactical map which
will allow you to command all your units at once. There is a slight
learning curve of about 40 minutes to truly get the hang of this and use
it effectively. Once the map is mastered however, it does help greatly
and allow you to have a lot more fun playing the game.
During battles the really cool thing is that you can
take over individual stations at will, going from being the overseer, to
one of the troops firing a fixed position gun on a ship, or engaging the
enemy in the skies, or even deep below the ocean firing torpedoes. It is
truly amazing, the whole setup. The only problem I found is that once
the battles get more intense, it was getting harder to enjoy the smaller
individual moments of the fighting as you would miss what was going on
in the big picture; a mistake that you really don’t want to make.
Graphically the game is nice to look at with quite an
amount of detail thrown in considering just how much can happen on
screen at any given time. Ship and other craft can suffer damage during
battle that if you are on the ball you can repair or if you miss the
opportunity you can also lose your ship so make sure that your guys are
out there fixing stuff. It doesn’t take too much game time to do and
will keep you fighting.
All things said and done, Battlestations is a really
fun game to play. The sheer range and style of play will keep you on
your toes and satisfy most gaming desires regardless of which part of
the game you prefer; action or strategy. Everything comes together in a
very nice package in the game and the ability to play both sides of the
conflict is really cool. Give it a shot, I don’t think you will be
disappointed. |
