As a result, you need to use these health "recharges" judiciously, and only when you're safely out of harm's way. This forces you to strategize a little differently; you never know how long a mission might be, and things can get hairy if you run out of health at the end of a level.
Among others, there's a scene where you're using mounted artillery to knock planes out of the sky, and a long sequence where you're in full control of a plane and attempt to bomb a Japanese carrier, Battlefield style. These sequences are often more fun than the jungle combat, although -- like a lot of the game -- they often become an exercise in trial and error.
This becomes exacerbated by the game's long load times: even "quick" loads can take 30 seconds or more, which quickly sucks the fun out of any scenario you might need to replay over and over. And trust us, you will get killed. Many, many times. From an artistic perspective, Pacific Assault is a beautiful game.
It's not just the fact that EA's brand-new engine can do technical things like impressive hi-res models, lighting effects and ragdoll physics; there's an aesthetic beauty to the world that makes everything attractive to look at, including an effective use of color.
The jungles are a standout: they're modeled with amazing detail, and at times they go beyond photo-realistic and into the realm of looking like live video. There are other artistic touches, such as the color momentarily draining every time you're shot, and an endless supply of sepia-toned loading screens.
Even the in-game menu is set inside a pseudo-level with surroundings and characters that change over the course of the game. It's a shame that so much of the game looks the same -- one jungle looks like the next, with the occasional village or camp or river to break things up. From both a visual and gameplay perspective, it would have been nice to see a little more variety in the jungle areas before you reach the final missions at Tarawa.
Aside from one questionable term used throughout the game, Pacific Assault generally takes a respectful tone towards war and American veterans. The orchestral score which is excellent goes from patriotic to somber, and there are bits of historical information to be found everywhere. Particularly cool are the "pop-up facts" that offer tidbits on the war as you play. It might be easy to overlook the fact that Pacific Assault also has multiplayer support, featuring three modes: free-for-all, team deathmatch and a new mode called Invader.
The latter is clearly the centerpiece of the multiplayer, in many ways mirroring the gameplay of Return to Castle Wolfenstein and Enemy Territory. It's the familiar Axis-vs-Allies scenario, and each of the eight huge multiplayer maps has its own special set of objectives. One team plays offense and tries to achieve all the objectives, while the other plays defense. Players can choose from four classes such as engineer or corpsman, and there are a lot of little features built in to promote teamwork although we'll have to see how that plays out over time.
I have high hopes for the multiplayer, since it solves a number of problems with the single-player game. You can generally stick to the more effective weapons and avoid the weaker ones, and since you're playing against live opponents, you don't have to deal with any of the silly AI gimmicks from the single-player game.
Pacific Assault is a tale of two games. It looks and sounds great, the production values are top-notch, there are some inspired set pieces that are genuinely fun to play through, and the multiplayer looks extremely promising. However, unlike its counterparts set in the European theater, I simply didn't enjoy the basic combat, and the high difficulty, combined with the long level reload times, rapidly turned the game into a frustrating experience.
More than anything, Pacific Assault feels like it's missing the balance, finesse and polish of games like Allied Assault and Call of Duty. Hardcore fans of those two games will probably find something to enjoy here. Thomas Conlin, a U. He arrives at Pearl Harbor early on the morning of December 7, As the planes begin the attack, he takes part in the defence by stopping the zero aircraft from attacking the battleships in the harbour.
He then enters one of the damaged battleships, the USS West Virginia, to save it from capsizing and to rescue the wounded sailors. After months of expectation, we've received some lovely single-player code for the game, and it's time to answer some of the big questions. What does it bring to the party? Does it do enough to justify its existence? Is it, to put it bluntly, an irrelevance? To settle the last one straight off - no, it's not irrelevant. In fact, it does a few quite interesting things with the war format, and with the right tweaking in the next month or so, could be a serious contender for your FPS attentions after you've finished Half-Life 2 for the second or third time, of course.
However, we'd be lying if we said it was going to be the defining moment the first game was. From what we've seen, Pacific Assault is going to have to rely on last-minute polish to match Call Of Duty. At present, it just doesn't have the same levels of excitement, intensity or scale.
But don't switch off just yet. The game has a definite charm of its own, and provided you reassess your expectations, there's plenty to look forward to here. For a start. Pacific Assault takes a different tack from Call Of Duty in a couple of key areas. While the basic gameplay is very similar -deliberately intense, highly scripted recreations of real- life historical battles, with a number of Al chums running at your side - the atmosphere is very different.
Most obviously, you've got the sun-drenched tropical setting. And I mean soaked. Some of the daytime missions are so bright and sunny, you actually think your gamma settings are screwed.
The developer has created a super-saturated look where the light burns out a lot of the detail and colour from the environment.
It's an unusual effect, but striking once you stop fiddling with your monitor settings. There's also the jungle itself. After the initial excitement of Tarawa Atoll a shameless revision of Allied Assault's Omaha Beach mission and Pearl Harbour a short but hurricane-force conflagration , the game settles into a long series of jungle-based skirmishes.
Unsurprisingly, the dense greenery has a profound impact on the way the game plays. Simply spotting the enemies through the foliage becomes a difficulty, and considerations such as cover, camouflage and surprise all take on new significance. There are definitely a few problems here too. For a start, it's far more difficult to create walls' in the environment to delimit the play area, often resulting in glaringly obvious foliage corridors.
A careless bounding box on a tree or shrub occasionally throws up an invisible wall between you and your target very frustrating. Worst of all, the whole thing can simply become monotonous. In its favour. Pacific Assault does manage to keep the tempo up with a variety of action set-pieces. An ambush in a swamp, a village raid, an escort duty on an airfield. True to formula, you also get the occasional high-paced on-rails section - riding shotgun in a stolen jeep or manning a mounted gun on a boat, for example.
Overall though, the jungle theme is a lot less exciting than, say, a war-torn village in occupied France, and the choice of location seems more suited to small-scale clashes than grand Call Of Duty-style affrays. Luckily, the game eventually moves out of the tight confines of the jungle and begins to climb to the levels of bullet-riddled ferocity we've come to expect.
The advantage of that approach was variety and historical veracity , but the weakness was a lack of identifiable characters and ongoing narrative. Here, Pacific Assault pounces, taking an active interest in character and working to build up the central figure of Tommy, the scared yet plucky young marine raider. It's a real contrast to Call Of Duty. Where that game had an international flavour, Pacific Assault is resolutely American, portraying Tommy as a small-town boy who just wants to get home to momma's apple pie.
Your squad-mates are also fleshed out to some extent in the grainy cut-scenes: the loudmouth leader, the bookish medic, the country bumpkin who's a mean shot with a sniper rifle.
Despite the fact that they're oddly indestructible on the battlefield, it works pretty well, creating a real feeling of identity and comradeship. At the outset, you're the rookie, fresh from a post-Pearl Harbour furlough and a few months' hurried training. You're initially looked on as a liability, the rook', and there's a genuine sense of gratification as you prove yourself to the more hardened raiders. Of course, it's manufactured that way, but ignore that fact and it works nicely.
An even stronger feature of the game is the new Corpsman' function. Rather than scattering health packs through the undergrowth, Pacific Assault introduces a corpsman or medic character that you can call on by pressing H' for, er, Help. It works much the same way as the equivalent character in a class-based multiplayer bout, except that this medic is actually obliged to come and treat you when called upon.
Of course, there are some caveats. If you're in the middle of a blazing firefight, the medic may not be able to reach you likewise if you stray too far from your squad. Your doctor's appointments are also limited in number, so it's not a licence to go on a rampage and then limp back for medical attention though that's exactly what I did throughout, to my cost.
To complement this feature, you also have to patch yourself up on occasion. Suffer a serious wound and a loud heartbeat sounds, meaning you have to bandage yourself quick smart or bleed to death. It's an old idea, pioneered in ancient Quake mods such as Action Quake II, but it still works wonders as a way of adding tension to the proceedings.
Despite these extra keys, however, Pacific Assault definitely has a more arcade feel to it than Call Of Duty. It's less hardcore, a little more forgiving; it has a touch of the Boys' Own Adventure to it. It's not a criticism - anything that distinguishes the game from its rivals is more than welcome, but if you were hoping for a harrowing trial to match, say, Stalingrad or Kursk from CoD, you might be disappointed.
Unfortunately, in the present build, there are some real concerns to be had. The Al, for a start, is all over the place. It does display some high points, such as the banzai charges of the Japanese troops and the aforementioned Corpsman, but it's also worryingly inadequate in some areas.
One time, I was being stabbed in the back by a Japanese bayonet and my squad-mates just looked on, unconcerned. Occasionally, one of my boys would yell, they're flanking us'', but I'm sorry Jimmy, they really weren't. In fact, they were just floundering around being useless or bobbing up and down rhythmically behind a rock. The fact that headshots don't seem to count for much is also frustrating and don't give me the I was wearing a helmet' line either Mr Samurai -1 shot you full in the face. Other issues include an annoying cursor lag, something a lot of people have been complaining about from the demo.
It's a small thing, but there's a perceptible pause between you pressing the mouse button and Tommy pulling the trigger, or indeed between you pressing R' and Tommy starting a reload. Hopefully both of these issues can be addressed before launch, although that November release date is worryingly close. Thankfully, EA certainly has the resources to achieve a great deal in a short time, and if it can resolve some of these problems it will have a great little war-themed FPS on its hands.
And that's not even mentioning the highly promising multiplayer game. I just hope for all our sakes that the game isn't rushed out - that would be to inflict great dishonour on the untarnished Medal Of Honor legacy.
Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault is more immersive history lesson than video game and I mean that in a very, very good way. The game opens up with you storming the beach on Tarawa Atoll with a bunch of fresh-faced kids, but then begins to flip back and forth to different times in your storied service.
You'll go through basic training under a Marine-loving leather-necked sergeant whose performance is right up there with the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. After basic, you flip to your first assignment in Hawaii on the day Pearl Harbor is attacked.
And that is where it all begins. The thing that is so amazing about these levels is the unbelievable level of detail. The attack on Pearl Harbor is particularly amazing.
You will spend a chunk of the level tooling around in a PT boat attempting to locate your ship as Zeroes buzz down around you attack your ship and the city of vessels around you. You actually get to watch as some famous battle ships catch on fire and slowly sink. The game doesn't stop with just amazing sea and ground battles.
You will also take to the air as you relive and play through the famous battles of the s pacific in some of the two dozen single player missions. The game plays mostly like the original Medal of Honor with a few twists; for instance you now need a medic to heal you instead of just relying on scavenged health packs and canteens.
In addition, a new, realistic setting removes all of the game's on-screen displays, making it hard to judge your health and even aim. The multiplayer mode includes three game types; invader, free-for-all and team deathmatch, and can support up to 32 players in nearly lag free play. The game is on a DVD and seems to access it quite a bit for cut scenes, which really adds to the load-times, but it is worth it. The Director's Edition comes with an exclusive light machine gun, music from the game, a timeline presentation, interviews from actual veterans, propaganda videos from both sides and a behind the scenes video of the making of the game.
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