Written by Jeff Buckland, 6/22/2007
When it comes to World War II games, you can find a huge range of strategy, combat, tactical, and even role-playing titles that span the world and cover hundreds and hundreds of weapons, vehicles, aircraft, and ships. Some are incredibly realistic while others are more cinematic, but few promise instant gratification like Attack on Pearl Harbor does. It's an arcade-style flight combat game where you will play from both American and Japanese sides in dogfights over major battles in the Pacific Theater of War.
Jumping right in to the single player game, you'll start by trying your best to defend Pearl Harbor from the Japanese attack on December 7, 1941. The controls are mouse-based and fairly easy to get into, as you've only got a few keys and buttons to worry about. Your left mouse button fires your infinitely-supplied machine guns (which can overheat, however, if you don't stop firing every once in a while) while the right button fires off a primitive rocket which will reload itself every several seconds. From there you've got to just take to the skies and dogfight. From one mission to the next there will often be surprises and you'll have a number of different goals, like taking out a group of bombers before they finish off a base, or do a nighttime torpedo run on a group of Japanese carriers. One thing you'll find out pretty quickly is that the real threats in this game come from enemy fighters rather than flak from ships or from the ground, and so it's often best to take out all the fighters you can before you make your attack runs.
The presentation in Attack on Pearl Harbor is in the style of a comic book, and while the major battles from the Pacific in WW2 are covered, don't expect much of a history lesson here. This is fast action and while you can perform a few interesting maneuvers by adjusting your throttle and swinging around, don't expect too much out of these old props. The game's played from a third-person perspective so you are supplied with a targeting reticle, but you'll still have to lead your prey a decent amount in order to score hits.
Sure, the graphics in Attack on Pearl Harbor might not win any awards, but the textures are pretty good and the volumetric clouds are a nice touch. The bases you'll often fight over have a decent amount of detail and the explosions and smoke effects look impressive while having little impact on the frame rate.
Pearl Harbor also includes a multiplayer mode where up to 12 players can get together in either Dogfight (deathmatch) or Team vs. Team modes. The smoothness of the game seems highly dependent on everyone having a good connection for this to be fun, as anyone who is lagging will hop and skip around in the air making them pretty tough to track and hit. You'll find that since everything's out in the open, you can be shooting at a guy while someone's shooting at you, and the guy that's coming after you is being shot at by a guy behind him in a big train of bullets. It's definitely a different kind of online shooting experience for someone like me who doesn't play much in the way of flight simulators.
Attack on Pearl Harbor looks to be one of the better arcade-style dogfighting games I've seen. The graphics and sounds are pretty good and the guns have good feedback and feel powerful. Multiplayer could use a bit of work before the game's released this coming July, but the single player mode has some excellent action. If you've always been intimidated by overly complex flight simulators and would like to try a bit of WW2 dogfighting, then Attack on Pearl Harbor will probably be a good game to start with.
