War Plan Pacific

Total score
Game play
Nuts & bolts

 

If it wasn’t for its one or two minor flaws this game would be very, very close to being my perfect beer & pretzels game, and save for those would have been my pick for game of the year for 2008. I love it any way, I’ll say that up front.

Nuts & bolts

The single worst feature of the game -- and let’s get the the bad stuff out of the way early -- is the game’s tendency to collapse into what I’ve been calling the light blue screen of death (in honour of the old dark blue BSOD). This is the light blue background screen that the Microsoft XNA game studio the game’s made with displays when it doesn’t have anything to do.  It’s not a crash, the window just blanks and you can get around if you’re affected by minimising & maximising the game every time it happens.  For me that’s every few mouse clicks. Not everyone gets this, but if you do you’ll feel my pain.

The whole XNA thing is a bit of a puzzler.  XNA’s the programming solution MS offers for 3D game designers, and apart from a rippling Japanese flag background this game has none of that at all. I mention this only because the XNA framework doesn’t have much by way of a pre-built 2D interface for programmers to use, like (as far as I can tell) an easy way to display things like tooltips on buttons.  Tooltips are my pet peeve at the moment and a peeve this game certainly falls foul of.  There are buttons with just a single letter on them and no tooltip to tell you what the letter could mean – an object lesson in choosing the right programming tool for the job. Perhaps dreams of XBox sales beckoned?

The single letter buttons are explained in the manual, which if you bought this game in physical form like me comes in a stapled together bunch of what look like photocopied pages, not one of Shrapnel’s usually extravagant perfect bound print jobs. Print quality’s not that much of an issue as the more sensible download delivery method’s now available too. Just don’t go the physical route if pretty manuals are your thing.

Added (later, that very same day): The contents of the manual itself though, as I’m grateful has been pointed out elsewhere, is fine.  It’s clearly written and reasonably comprehensive, but unlike some recent examples of the genre also mercifully brief.  Worth noting too is that for the first time in a quite a while I got to enjoy reading through the developer’s notes at the end of the rules, especially the epilogue there.  Whatever happened to touches like that?  Developer’s notes used to come with almost all wargames. (End addition.)

There are some interface issues as well that were a little confusing at first – you click on Chose Mission for a fleet and you get thrown back to the map, whaaa? But it’s pretty clear pretty quickly that what the button means is chose your fleet’s destination. Other than that …

The interface is a dream to use.  If you want to move planes from defending to attacking you just drag them there.  Ships to a new task force? Drag them. New destination? Just click on it. All very easy. And as a bonus (are you reading this Ageod?) the game’s built around dragging & dropping stuff - and that part works.  Effortlessly.  You don’t need to fiddle to line things up like you do in Ageod’s WWI.  It just works. So much so I’m willing to look past the game’s light blue screen shenanigans, cross my fingers that it gets fixed in a patch, and give the game one star for nuts & bolts any way. Without the LBSOD I’d be thinking about two stars, the interface is that suited to the beer & proverbial pretzels game it’s designed to be.

Game play - Driving me to abstraction

The whole Pacific War in an evening? Easily. But you don’t get that without a judicious bit of leaving stuff out, and that as much as putting stuff in is the game designer’s art. As a result of all the  ruthless chopping some people are going to find their favourite feature of the war just isn’t here, and may be disappointed as a result.  So let’s rattle off a list: submarines & destroyers & the whole campaign to strangle Japan’s supplies?  Nope.  Lots of land based air controlling the sea for miles around?  Nope.  Strategic bombing?  Sort of, but only in a very abstract sense. Land battles, and Monty’s bogeyman the Land War In Asia?  Nope.

Some of these things do appear in the game, but only in a highly abstract way.  Destroyers for example appear as Japanese torpedo attacks in surface combat. And some of these things are achievable, but using different tools: You can cut off Japan’s supply, but you’ll do it on the surface, not beneath it.

What the game does have in spades is a really quite elegant point to point system of air-naval battles that for me perfectly captures the idea of an island hopping campaign.  Battles don’t happen in the middle of nowhere for no reason, they happen in the middle of nowhere because there happens to be a coral atoll there. Dusky maidens, swaying coconut palms, airfields and all. This does make several year campaigns in Papua disappear, along with rather a few million Chinese, but the essentials of the war, the carrier battles for remote specks of land in a vast ocean, they’re handled very well. (Oh, and before you click buy: do note the dusky maidens are also abstracted.)

As Japan what you’re trying to achieve with your carriers is securing your oil supply while cutting the sea supply route to Australia, or just lasting long enough without being bombed to bits; and as America it’s cutting Japan’s oil supply and/or bombing Japan to bits before the great unwashed lose interest. The bombing happens abstractly, if you hold enough working bases within range of Japan it happens, if you don’t it doesn’t.  Reach 25 points of death and destruction and Japan’s completely horizontal.

I do have some quibbles with the game play, hey, it’s me after all (!). As mentioned cutting off Japan's oil supply is one way to end the game, but without submarines there’s a lot more reason to go back to the Philippines than there probably should be, and the British are a lot more active raiding as a result too.   The point to point movement system also has its downside.  It can be a bit too easy for two gigantic invasion fleets to pass each other like (well, literally like) ships in the night. There’s reaction, but fleets can still pass each other. And a player’s supply of the abstracted invasion fleets she/he needs to invade and hold a point on the map rather than just raid it, is random, and continues for both sides throughout the war.  That makes Japan just a little too frisky in the end game for me, but keeps a player on his/her toes I suppose. But these are all just quibbles for beer & pretzels fare, this game isn’t trying to be War in the Pacific, and none of these quibbles really detracts from the fun I’m having too much at all.

The AI is generally good (read aggressive, without always being too foolhardy). In the initial release of the game the US AI was altogether too eager to smash itself to pieces against the Japanese home islands, but that’s been fixed in a patch.  But the US still seems a bit sluggish to respond to a player cutting the sea supply route to Australia.  While simultaneously the AI for both sides will send carriers out by themselves a little too happily (with abstracted destroyers I suppose).  Scratch one flat top. But all up the AI’s pretty good.

The scenarios are XML files and if you’re comfortable with playing with those they’re eminently editable.  There’s no editor with the game however and the graphics, sounds and other resources all come as precompiled XNA binaries.  So don’t expect anyone to do alternate maps or counters any time soon.

have you bought it yet?

I’ve played this game more than any other recently, and it looks like it’ll be my standby game for a quick fix of combat for a long while to come.  I’m looking forward to future designs by this guy.  This is his first, and it’s a great start.