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An area that has been a tricky nut to crack has been that of console simulations. This is partly due to the nature of console gaming, the pick up and play quality and the means of play. Controllers don’t lend as well to simulations as keyboards. With Battlestations Midway, Eidos Interactive Hungary have attempted to address this, but do their fish swim straight and true, or should this be consigned to Davy Jones locker?

Battlestations Midway is a 3rd person simulation that consists of several game modes, single player campaign, tutorials, ship challenges, submarine challenges, plane challenges and online play, but it’s the single player campaign that contains the bulk of the work. You play the part of a young naval recruit, Henry Walker and track his rise through the ranks of the US Navy during the war of the Pacific, which begins with manning the guns of a patrol boat during the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbour. From there you follow the campaign in the Pacific, fighting in legendary battles with the goal of breaking the Japanese stranglehold on the Pacific, and to liberate various Pacific islands until the final conflict at Midway. The single player campaign is not just a vehicle to pitch different objectives and targets. This is a well thought out and carefully constructed campaign that appears to replicate the various battles of the Pacific while occasionally touching on the politics of war. It is clear from the outset that this is not just another passenger on the WWII bandwagon.

If you jump into the single player campaign straight away, you would be forgiven to think that there isn’t much to Battlestations Midway, that it doesn’t have a lot to offer, but you would be wrong. Battlestations Midway is a comprehensive simulation where you get to not only command units, but also assume control of them as well. In fact, calling it a simulation wouldn’t be fair or accurate as it’s not a simulation in the strictest sense of the word. The units available to you in the game include patrol boats (PT boat), destroyers, aircraft carriers, submarines, fighter planes, dive bombers, fighter bombers, torpedo bombers and even land based runways and sea-plane hangars. With such a wealth of hardware, a run through the tutorials in the Naval Academy before tackling any of the other game modes is required. The tutorial is essential, very thorough and is a guaranteed cure for insomnia. You do have to force yourself through it as it soon becomes a chore to complete, but it does deal with each of the available craft, how they function, navigation, damage control (for larger ships), weapons and weapon use, etc. Upon completion of the tutorial, you begin to get an understanding for the depth and complexity of this game. 

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