Madden is the king of sports games. Burnout, the king of arcade racers. But where is the royal family of combat flight?
There have been some combat flight games that have been fun. Secret Weapons Over Normandy was one. The history, the animations, the story in that game were very good (you can read my review on that). Honestly, when I heard Heroes of the Pacific announced, I was expecting it to take the good things of Secret Weapons and take them to the next level. The bottom line is: it didn't.
I'm not saying Heroes is bad. It's not. The graphics are nice and the sound is generally very good. There are some real nice effects with smoke and debris that make it very realistic. Even details like errant shots splashing in the water and such make it feel very alive.
The training mode is pretty good at getting you ready for combat, but, I thought it was a little long and achievment checkpoints were too spread out making you repeat certain sections again and again. What really lacked for me, was the overall gameplay. The controls seemed too lose, making it tough to pursue and zero in on targets. Stalling occurs too easy and in the beginning, your enemies are so slow you can't really pursue without stalling your engine. You're forced to fly past them from the side rather than come from behind, making it take longer than it probably should.
The other problem in the game is that while the graphics are good, you pay the price of low frame rate. Certain sections force the combat to slow to a crawl because of everything going on. Addtionalliy, at times there's no clear indictation of what your current objective is or how to achieve it.
I'll be honest, I got pretty frustrated with the game and didn't get too far into it. I rented it to see if it was all I had expected and since it really wasn't, I returned it. Bottom line for me is, it is certainly no better than Secret Weapons Over Normandy, so to me it wasn't worth owning. Someday, I hope, someone will put the thought and energy into a combat flight game that has already been down with sports games and racers. Until then, the sky is still the limit on flying games.