Attack on Pearl Harbor will give you some enjoyable moments in the air, but the game will begin to grow old on you sooner rather than later for several reasons. The first issue I ran into was with the game's controls; there's no way to remap the controls and the default settings are just plain weird. For example, the game has support for the Xbox 360 controller but you can not use it to navigate the menus. Even worse, the game does not use the controller's triggers at all, instead choosing to map the guns and bombs to the A and B buttons. Even after playing the game for a few hours I found myself trying to squeeze the trigger when I dropped in behind an enemy. The next issue is with the game's AI. When you maneuver yourself behind an enemy and open fire he'll pretty much ignore the fact that you're filling his plane full of lead. Even though he won't try anything to shake you off of his tail he does have one big factor working in his favor. Since the game has no throttle control all planes are locked into a single speed and all of the enemy planes fly at a slower speed than you. This means that you are constantly overshooting planes when you manage to get on their tail. This is pretty frustrating on its own, but it's made worse by the fact that the game doesn't seem to register your hits on the target when you're up close and personal. I would imagine that most bullets would find their mark when you're almost close enough to reach out and touch the other plane. When you're on the receiving end of a bullet stream it doesn't take much to shake off an attacker - a simple hard bank right or left will almost always do the trick. It's strange that the deadliest AI in the game comes in the form of the tail gunners on the enemy bombers. Their accuracy is deadly and no matter how much you bob and weave they manage to keep you in their sights and can bring you down pretty quickly if you're not careful.
However, the game's biggest shortcoming comes in the form of its mission design. There are only four basic mission types (defend, bomb, patrol, and escort) and they all pretty much play out the same. It doesn't really matter if you're defending a fuel depot or MacArthur's PT boat, in each case you're trying to shoot down all of the enemies before the health bar on the thing you're defending is reduced to zero. Some of the missions simply don't make sense and are frustrating as a result. For example, you may be called upon to go after a fleet of ships that has air cover while you're flying solo in a torpedo bomber. The game is not a flight sim, but it does make a fighter a lot more nimble in the air than a bomber so it's a chore trying to clear out the air cover by dogfighting in a bomber. On one such mission I managed to take out my targets before my bomber was completely engulfed in flames, only to find that my next objective was to shoot down all remaining fighter planes. Why the designers didn't add some friendly escort fighters to this mission is beyond me.
Attack on Pearl Harbor also includes multiplayer support for LAN or Internet games, but I wasn't able to test out this feature. I just couldn't find any hosted games available each time I looked, and when I created my own game I just spent a lot of time flying around by myself.
Attack on Pearl Harbor has its moments, but it will have trouble holding your interest all the way through the campaigns. If the mission design was more imaginative and the missions more varied it would be easier to look past the game's faults in recommending it. As it stands, though, it's best left to those with a strong interest in this type of game.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
66%. Attack on Pearl Harbor fails to score a direct hit.
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