Pacific Heroes Review

3D dogfighting done simply--perhaps a little too simply.

City Interactive's Pacific Heroes takes the concept of a World War II-era flight combat game and simplifies it into a brief, fleeting shooter. Twenty missions are available in the game. Most of the time, you'll be controlling a small fighter plane, ducking and dodging around the skies over the Pacific rim, shooting it out with Japanese fighters. Periodically these fighting missions are broken up by more target-focused fare--where you'll be dropping torpedoes on aircraft carriers and such--as well as some solid turret shooting levels.

The controls aren't difficult to grasp at all. Your plane is always in motion, and all you need to do is use the mouse to steer, and the mouse buttons to use your machine gun and drop torpedoes. Targeting isn't overly challenging, though you will have to lead your shots ahead of enemy planes to hit them. Occasionally things can get confusing: The game automatically bumps your plane back into the proper playing field if you happen to get too low or too high, and sometimes this can be a rather jerky process.

Apart from occasional camera issues, though, this is one of the best-looking games on MSN's games service--just not necessarily one of the better-looking PC shooters out there. Fully 3D visuals are provided, and though the environments rarely transcend a couple of islands and a lot of water--and the planes and ships aren't especially detailed--it's all still quite decent looking. But for anyone used to more traditional PC flight combat games, it all might be too dumbed down for your tastes.

Once the 20 missions are up, there's really nothing to bring you back to Pacific Heroes. Levels can be played individually, but there's no score keeping, and each mission doesn't take more than a few minutes to finish. Ultimately, for as amusing of a brief distraction that Pacific Heroes can be, it's probably not worth the price of admission.

The Good

  • Solid 3D graphics engine
  • 20 different missions

The Bad

  • Most missions are short--not much replay value
  • Sometimes confusing camera
  • Oversimplified shooting and flying

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