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Macworld has posted a new review of Battlestations: Midway, a World War II game brought to the Mac by Feral Interactive. In the game players experience World War II combat in a blend of action and strategy as they lead a host of US and Allied air, sea and underwater units through missions in hotspots from Pearl Harbor to the Battle of Midway itself. Macworld gave the game a score of 3 out of 5 mice.

From the review:

Instead of doing or one two things well, Battlestations Midway does a lot of things inadequately. Instead of full flight controls, or an intuitive set of ship commands, or giving the sub captains a realistic experience, the developers of Battlestations Midway try to slap together universal controls for everything. The ship’s controls are so frustrating that I almost never took control over a ship in combat, instead preferring to order around the ship in map mode or pilot a plane.

The enemy artificial intelligence is fairly easy to take down, but you wonder how you can win the war with the idiotic AI you are paired with. Your fellow pilots have the survival skills of lemmings, thus making winning missions extremely difficult at times. For certain missions they’ll do all the work for you and other times they’ll decide to become pacifists in the middle of an artillery barrage. The difficulty level of the missions isn’t a steady slope to climb, but rather resembles an EKG line.

Sadly, the most frustrating aspect of the gameplay is the command system. It’s frankly too much “everything” to command at points. While playing, you have to almost exclusively be in map mode in order to control your battle groups. You can order individual flights and ships while controlling them, but there is no way to lead the charge in a B-17 and tell your destroyers to cover your butt while you go in for a bombing run. While you can take control of any one ship or any one plane, this leads to the rest of your battle group going on autopilot and meander aimlessly into enemy fire. Frustratingly, you’ll find your view of the final Midway battles to be in map mode with quick jumps to your carriers so you can launch fighters. One of the greatest joys of the game is witnessing your coordinated attacks succeed from the perspective of a dive bomber. But, you’ll spend very little time in watching your attacks because you’ll keep switching perspectives to map mode (to command your ships) and aircraft mode (so you can launch your planes).

Macworld: Battlestations Midway Review

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