I recently had the chance to play a preview build of Attack on Pearl Harbor and after spending time with the game I can tell you a couple of things that the game is not. First of all the entire game is not set during Pearl Harbor. The opening mission of the Japanese and the American campaigns is set at Pearl, but game spans the entire War in the Pacific. Secondly, the game may look like a flight sim, but it is decidedly not a sim. In fact, a more accurate description of the game would be that it is an “aerial third-person shooter”. Now that I’ve established what the game is not, let’s take a look at what it is.

Attack on Pearl Harbor features American and Japanese campaigns that put you in the cockpit of a variety of Naval and Marine planes include fighters, bombers, and torpedo planes. The campaign features a branching mission structure that lets you make choices at certain junctures to take on fighter or bomber missions. Once you select a mission you must choose which plane to fly. At first the choices will be pretty limited but as you complete missions you’re accomplishments will help you earn new planes to add to the list giving you more selections. However, if you happen to crash a plane in a mission or get shot down you’ll no longer have that plane available and will have to earn it again. The game is little forgiving in this regard, though, so you don’t have to play in constant fear of being left planeless. You’re not required to successfully complete a mission before you move on to the next one, so if you’re having trouble with a particular one you do not need to worry about losing your entire air fleet to it. On the other hand, successfully completing missions earns you more points and credits for new planes, plus gives you the chance to win medals, so you’ll have to balance the reward against the risk when deciding whether to retry a mission or to move on. The missions in the campaign are wrapped between comic-panel cutscenes that look like they were pulled from a World War II era comic. It’s a pretty cool motif, especially when the overly dramatic and emotional cutscene has been done to death in World War II games.

Once you’re in a mission and in the air you’ll find that the game is very forgiving as far as its flight model is concerned. You’ll fly at one of two speeds, fast and turbo, have unlimited bombs and ammo, and be able to pull off maneuvers that would send a plane into a death spiral if not tear it apart. About the only way to crash your plane yourself in the game is to run into the ground or to collide with another plane, and even in this latter case you may not take enough damage to send you to the ground. The missions are all designed to put plenty of planes in the air, both allied and enemy, and get you into the action pretty quickly – there are no long flights to staging areas or mission zones. The missions are all about shooting down as many enemy planes as possible (or dropping a ton of ordnance on your targets) and while your guns can overheat if you never ease off of the trigger, you’re blessed with unlimited ammunition. The fighter planes also carry unlimited rockets, although you will need to wait a few seconds before the next one is ready to be fired.

The game is all about arcade shooter action in the sky and it does a good job of delivering it. It’s a bit reminiscent of Blazing Angels or Heroes of the Pacific, except that it throws a lot more targets at you than those two games. If you enjoy some good clean dogfighting fun without worrying about things like stalls and blackouts, you’ll definitely want to give Attack on Pearl Harbor a close look when it is released.