Attack on Pearl Harbor is a fun little WWII shooter

Attack on Pearl Harbor is a simple aircraft shooting game set during World War II. You pilot fighter planes and bombers around the Pacific Islands while shooting down enemy planes and dropping torpedoes on enemy ships. Once you get used to the controls, it actually turns out to be pretty fun, but it still needs some work.

If you ever played any of the Star Wars Starfighter games, this is pretty much the same thing. It is by no means a flight simulator because all you can adjust is the speed of the plane. The plane is piloted by using the mouse to move a crosshair around the screen, and the plane follows the crosshair. It is very arcade-like, and I had to adjust the X and Y axis sensitivity several times until I got used to them. Once I got the controls down, it was a lot more fun. It also has multiplayer support, but I haven’t tried to play it online.

Your missions usually include one of several key elements. First, there are always planes to shoot down. Second, you’ll often have to take out enemy ships. Third, you must protect something. In a lot of the missions you have to keep some ground target from being destroyed, so you have to shoot the planes that get closest first. When an enemy plane goes into a nosedive, you can pretty much forget about hitting them until after they pull up. They are dropping bombs during this dive, so watch out.

I quickly learned that certain planes need to be confronted certain ways. It is never a good idea to go at them head on since they all have machine guns, but you also have to be careful when you get behind the ones with tail gunners. The crosshair on screen turns red whenever your shot will do damage, so often you have to lead the target when they are moving quickly or way out in front. I found the best time to shoot is when the enemy plane is turning because it gives you a nice broadside target and they can’t shoot back at you.

The graphics in this game aren’t all that impressive compared to other recent games. Even at the highest screen resolution with the detail level on High, it still looks a lot like the aerial parts of Battlefield 1942, which was released several years ago. This game does support widescreen, which is nice. Your own plane doesn’t look too bad, but there’s still a lot of jagged edges on screen. The enemy planes and ships are still pretty well detailed. I’ve read one review from a user with an ATI video card and they were having trouble getting it out of Window mode, but I had no problem with my Nvidia. This game works just fine on Windows Vista, too.

The sound effects don’t play too big a role in the game since this is mostly graphic intensive. Since you are flying a pretty low-tech airplane, there isn’t any kind of radar scanner or missile lock warning to worry about. You just aim and fire, and the enemy does the same. Instead of using audio alerts when your base is in trouble, or when a fellow pilot needs some help, you just get text messages on screen. You can hear machine gun sounds when you’re being shot from afar, but you can also look at the direction of the bullets to know where the enemy plane is located.

This game could use a little work with the overall design and presentation. I mean, even their website wasn’t coded correctly! If you go to the website (www.pearlharbor-game.com) you will see that they coded it using Frames, but they messed it up because the frames load in new windows instead of within the page. Now that’s funny. As far as game design goes, they really need to work on the menu system.

The menu system is a labyrinth of Next and Back buttons, and nowhere in the game can you change any of the video or control settings. The only time you can adjust the video or controls is when you first start the game, when it loads the configuration menu. If you need to adjust the control sensitivity after starting the game, you have to quit the game and restart. If you want to quit the game after failing a mission, you have to go through several different screens just to get back to the main menu. That kind of menu system looks like it should have been on a console game instead of the PC.

As of this writing, there are no patches or updates yet available for this game. With a little tweaking of the menus as well as the controls, Attack on Pearl Harbor could win over more people. I still think this type of game seems more suited for a console system than the PC.