History Channel: Battle For the Pacific

List Price: $19.99 Discount Price: $4.83

Features:

• Developed with The History Channel
• Play through the eyes of an American GI
• Authentic WWII missions and weapons
• Cinematic war experience
• Play online as an American or Japanese soldier

Customer Reviews:

Very, very dispointing/Complete Waste of Money [Posted on 2007-12-23]
This game was extremely disappointing. It sounded like a good idea, pairing up with the History Channel to create realistic battles from the Pacific theater. However, this game is quite lacking in many areas.

The game-play started to get repetitively boring and pointless on the first level, and stayed the same throughout the entire game. Most frustrating was the lack of freedom your character actually has in the game. You are forced to follow a computer controlled leader that can never die. If you you don't keep up with him, the game ends, and it says "Mission Failed." If you take too long fighting some Japanese after he and the other computer GI's have run off, "Mission Failed." If you do anything except stay next to him the entire time, "Mission Failed" regardless of whether or not there has been a single shot fired yet.

You also have to stay on only one path throughout the game. It looks like the area of play is really big, and you could go anywhere, but it's just an illusion. You have a very narrow strip of area to play in, and you can hardly spend any time in one area, because you are being dragged along this little narrow path.

The graphics are nothing to be excited about either; if this game was released 4 or 5 years ago, that would be different. Every single Japanese soldier was exactly the same. What happened to the different kinds of soldiers, the uniforms, the officers with their swords? That got really boring after a while. One of the worst aspects of this war was the civilian casualty rate on these islands. Yet not one civilian is to be seen anywhere during the entire game; not people, no villages, or anything.

The AI of the enemies is terrible as well. While the Japanese were famous for suicidal bayonet charges and such, they were also brilliant at land combat strategy, and jungle-warfare, and are horribly misrepresented by the terrible AI in this game.

And lastly, most dissapointing for me was that the entire Battle of Okinawa was left completely out of the game. Okinawa had the fiercest and worst ground battles of anywhere in the Pacific, with the Japanese dug into the island's castle ruins as command posts; and yet it was left out completely.

The game was easy to beat in about two days of playing a couple hours each day. And there's not much point and playing it again after that, since there's nothing that you could have missed the first time around; nothing new to discover because of the game's stupid restrictions.

In closing, I feel that this game is a complete waste of money.

Bait and switch [Posted on 2007-12-26]
I may never get to find out if the game is fun or not. The minimum system requirements as listed on the packaging are 256 MB RAM, Pentium 1.0 GHz, 64MB video card. When you call technical support they tell you the minimum requirements are 512 MB RAM, Pentium 2.5 GHz and 256 MB video card.

Avoid this game at all costs!! [Posted on 2008-04-27]
This game has only been out a few months, luckily I paid 10 bucks for it on sale, but even that is way too much. Once I got the box and saw it said Activision Value, I figured it was not going to turn out good. To sum it up the best part of the game are the video clips in between levels which is only old news footage with new voiceover. The guns are kinda boring, and the model quality not very good at all. You can aim with the crosshair or down the sight, but you still have the crosshair. Not that it matters much as 9 out of 10 times the japanese just stand there and let you shoot them. Only you and the Japanese will die besides one or two scripted scenes. Your leader can be 2 feet from a japanese blasting a entire mag at him, and nothing but your not that lucky. However the AI is so bad, very rarely do they land hits and usually a killing shot is not to often. I finished the game in about 2 hours on normal. As the other review said, most of the battles are skipped and other than entering MG's or a Quad .50 to shoot at planes. There is not much good to say. The game is completely linear and you have no freedom of your actions. If your a couple seconds to slow mission failed happens as it says your not following orders. Graphics are weak, but not terrible except on the weapons are a little dull, and the Aircraft look very dull and move a bit to slow for fighters. The levels are pretty basic and youll find yourself in the jungle or the trench for most of the game. Often going back and forth in the same spots over and over. It was no surprise that not a single multiplayer server was available. This game has nothing to offer any player. Its fine if you have kids as the skill level is very basic, however a little foul language is in the game. Im leery of the other history channel games now. Not sure who was trying to make a quick buck.

The most linear game ever. [Posted on 2008-05-21]
Battle For The Pacific has got to be the most linear game I have ever played. The freedom is completely and totally taken away from you. I can't actually believe they made a game this way. You are literally forced to follow a leader the entire game. You want to stay behind a little just to finish off some enemies? Mission failed! You take a little longer than the rest of the troops to follow the leader? Mission failed! This is totally unacceptable for any game. The leader calls out "you will follow me and that's an order" over and over again until the level ends and the same thing starts all over again.

Don't get suckered in by the screenshots you see of this game. The graphics are the best thing about the game but you only get seconds to enjoy them because if you don't stay right on the leader's butt the mission will fail. You can't get out to explore the graphics at all because you are being roped along a very narrow linear path of the leader.

The game itself is short....very short. Each of the linear levels is only minutes long. You could easily finish this game in one day if you wanted. As far as bugs, sometimes the leader will get stuck and just sit there until you move ahead a little too. There's also a bug that I encountered with the options in the pc version. No matter what I chose as the "interact" key, it would not work in the game unless I set it back to the default "E" key. This game has console port written all over it.

The enjoyment factor is completely ripped away from you by forcing you to follow a leader. Just check the major gaming reviews of this game. They are terrible and mainly because of how linear this game is. Battle For the Pacific should be listed as "unavailable" here. No one should ever pay for a terrible game like this.

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