Battlestations: Midway Preview
This tactical action game has been three years in the making, and it's now finally approaching release. We take a look at the campaign and multiplayer modes.
Originally intended for release on the Xbox, Battlestations Midway has had a development period of more than three years and has subsequently made the jump to the Xbox 360. The game was conceived by now-defunct studio Mythos Games, but it caught the eye of Eidos' Hungary studio, and the game has been under development there ever since. With a scheduled release date of Q1 2007, Eidos invited us aboard the naval museum HMS Belfast to play the latest build of the single-player game and talk to the game's lead designer. We then got a chance to try out the eight-player online mode, which seems like it will make the game's unique mixture of action and strategy even more compelling.
For the uninitiated, Battlestations Midway is set to offer a mixture of strategy and action set in the Pacific theatre of World War II. While it's a strategy game at heart, it will also offer the chance for you to get your hands dirty and control authentic military vehicles of the age. With so many units to control on each level, the developers have balanced the artificial intelligence to offer strong defensive capabilities, so you can give them orders and be safe in the knowledge that they can protect themselves. However, the onus is on you to take control of your fighters for offensive strikes, particularly for bombing runs and dogfights.
A tactical map lets you orchestrate all this chaos from one place as you move units, assign targets, and plan the strategic advancement toward that level's goal. You're usually given a couple of objectives for each map, such as blowing up an airbase or defending your battleship, and you can assign tasks to each of your air, sea, and undersea units to achieve this goal. Units display a decent amount of intelligence, too--they'll divert to take out threats instead of blindly heading toward a target, for example. However, you'll still need to take control of your offensive units if you want the best chance of success.
Our preview of Battlestations Midway let us come to grips with a couple of the game's missions, as well as see some of the video clips that drive the story forward. The narrative concerns a young captain named Henry Walker, who at the beginning of the game is involved in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Walker rises through the ranks of the Navy as you progress, until you ultimately become involved with the battle of Midway at the culmination of the game. Klaude Thomas, the game's lead designer, says that he wanted to anchor the player with a character so that people unfamiliar with the history of World War II would be able to get a handle on events.
While it sounds like a complicated game, Battlestations Midway is definitely geared toward the console crowd. The strategy map is easy to use, because all you need to do is click on units and tell them where to go. The action elements are arcade in feel, with no complicated controls to fuss over while you're trying to coordinate an attack. Having said that, the game is still quite difficult, because you need to keep a constant eye on your battle station. As well as housing Henry Walker, your battle station is able to launch new units to replace the ones lost in battle, so it's fundamental that you keep it running above everything else.
As the game progresses, you'll find that more craft will be placed under your control. When you start out, you're given PT ships and destroyers to command, and as you continue, you're given missions for dogfighting, torpedo runs, and sneaking around in submarines. In one of the missions we played, the main objective was to destroy an airfield that was launching fighters to take down our units. Using our battleship to commence an air attack, the developers instructed us to use smaller fighters to take out the enemy's planes while one squadron remained with the battleship for protection. Taking out the first wave of fighters, the route was cleared for a bomber to drop the mother lode onto the airfield. The camera pans down and displays a crosshair, and as we avoided the incoming fire thanks to some nifty air support, we dropped the bomb directly onto the target. It was a perfect opportunity for the developers to show off one stylistic touch--hold down the fire button and the camera will stay with the missile as it hurtles toward its target. It's reminiscent of the famous shot from the movie Pearl Harbor, as the same shot shows a missile's path from attacker to target.
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- GameSpot Score7.8good
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Battlestations: Midway Review
Battlestations: Midway strikes just the right balance between action and strategy to create a game that's as unique as it is enjoyable.
- Jan 31, 2007
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- Release: Jan 30, 2007 »
- ESRB: Teen
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