Battlestations Pacific Demo Review

Battlestations Pacific is a mostly third, and a little first, person war simulation game.  It features warfare from the pacific theatre era, ie pearl harbour.  Before Battlestations Pacific there was Battlestations Midway, and Midway wasn’t fun, Pacific is fun.  Some things Battlestations Pacific Demo do are really sweet, some are not.  Here is my list of Pros and Cons for the demo.

Pros:

1. Graphics look great, the explosions and water look amazing.  The underwater submarine graphics where you see the sunlight shining down through the water is especially eye catching.
2. Dogfighting is a blast.
3. The combat system is very deep, you can outfit your aircraft with various weapon systems, you can command your squads and fleets.

Cons:

1. The demo does not remember your settings.  (Supposedly they know about this and are making a fix.)
2. You can’t choose what directory to install the game to, also it doesn’t even tell you where it installed to.  (It installs to C:Program FilesEIDOS)
3. Multiplayer is turned off in the demo.  I always prefer playing humans rather than bots, so not including mutliplayer is a big letdown.  No way would I spend cash on a game that I didn’t know how it performed online.
4. There aren’t any tutorials in game to show you how to use the more complicated features, I had to read all the commands in the options menu to realize that I could command squads and place different assets.
5. Having to sit through 2 minutes of advertising, with no way to skip, after you exit the demo.

In Conclusion, the demo was pretty fun.  There is a lot of eye candy and the aircraft and naval assets were generally easy and fun to control.  I knew going in that BSP was going to play more like a arcade game than a simulation, so I wasn’t caught off guard.  I hope they release a multiplayer demo though, as that is a huge part for me, I much rather play other human players than computer controlled opponents.  Despite a few flaws, and no included online play, I am looking forward to more pacific action.

Here are some videos I took of the gameplay in Battlestations Pacific.

[flv width=”560″ height=”370″]http://www.fragtheplanet.com/wp-content/uploads/videos/air.flv[/flv] [flv width=”560″ height=”370″]http://www.fragtheplanet.com/wp-content/uploads/videos/bp2.flv[/flv] [flv width=”560″ height=”370″]http://www.fragtheplanet.com/wp-content/uploads/videos/kamikaze.flv[/flv]