PC flight sim Pacific Strike was originally reviewed in E10, published in July 1994.
With an uncharacteristic lack of hype, the latest Origin epic to gobble up acres of disk space, memory and processor power wobbles bloatedly on to the scene. Pacific Strike is the sequel to Strike Commander, set during the Second World War when pilots drank ‘java’ and spoke of ‘Tojo’. Here’s where we join the action, just as the Americans finally realise there’s a war on when the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbour. Our trusty apple pie heroes leap into a couple of Wildcats sat on the runway and give the Japs what for, armed only with machine guns and a sickening line in gung-ho.
Thus begins a typical Origin flight sim, a series of missions taking out fighters, bombing aircraft carriers and crippling the Nipponese menace. If you’ve played Strike Commander you know the drill. Between each mission there’s a chance to talk with your poorly-animated pals in the mess hall, and it’s here the plot, such as it is, gradually unfolds. Biggs, your CO, briefs you on the next mission, while talking to Squints (the ace but burned-out pilot with an eyesight problem) and Jester (your loathsome, wholesome wingman) sometimes earns you battle tips.
In the air it’s all you can do to stop goggling at the gorgeously detailed texture-mapping of the planes and carriers and concentrate on finding the enemy without a radar. You’re over the sea most of the time too, which doesn’t help visually.
Lengthy between-mission scenes showcase 1994′s CD-ROM tech.
What Origin has realised at last is that modern flight sims are really ridiculously simple to play. You target the enemy a mile away when he’s still a dot in the sky, loose off a missile and go on to the next victim while the weapon does its work automatically.
Pacific Strike, because of its time setting, does away with all that – it forces you to get into extremely close combat. You have but a primitive plane, a few machine guns and occasionally some bombs to do the job with, and it turns out to be a great deal more fun. Strafing an aircraft carrier from 200 feet and pulling up just as it goes under in a glorious bitmapped explosion gets the adrenaline flowing quicker than any missile plucking a MiG-29 from the sky can. But the game isn’t nearly as frustrating as you might imagine. Given the lack of high-tech weaponry and radar equipment, it’s natural to expect long arduous dogfights punctuated by much confusion as you lose your target. This doesn’t happen; the external views are excellent for keeping track of an incoming fighter – which you can then rip to pieces with your guns surprisingly easily. The difficulty level ramps up, as you’d expect, but not nearly as quickly as it does in Strike Commander.
Pacific Strike won’t be as widely-trumpeted as its predecessor, although in some ways it’s a better game. It’s more involving and therefore more rewarding because you’re forced into the thick of the action, but at the same time the lack of hardware to worry about means it’s easier to play. It’s an arcade game, really; the mission builders and ‘instant action’ scenarios give you the ability to plug and play without the fuss.
Unfortunately two things count against it. The first is speed – it’s slower than Strike Commander, if that’s possible. If you want to witness the full splendour of its texture-mapped graphics (and if you don’t you may just as well play Tempest 2000), do not attempt to run Strike on anything less than a 50MHz DX2 with Local Bus graphics, because it’s an agonisingly doddlesome experience which puts you off the game for ever.
Secondly, there’s originality – this is the last time Origin can get away with rewriting Strike Commander. There’s nothing worse than a string of almost identical games that use a once-impressive graphics engine to prop up a paucity of gameplay – witness the Ultimate Play The Game series on the spectrum all those years ago. The possibility of there being a Strike Lieutenant, Artic Strike, Bosnian Strike and yes, maybe even Desert Strike just doesn’t bear thinking about.
But for now, Pacific Strike will do very nicely indeed.
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