I’m not the simulator guru of GamingShogun.com, I’m more like our Jack of All Trades, and when it comes to my games my favorite ones tend to fall into that line too. I love running around as infantry with a rifle, but if I can jump in a jeep I will. If I can go from that jeep to a APC or a tank count me in the heavier metal. The fighter jocks get all the glory so I try my hand at them because my favorite war games have always had aerial units.
My flight stick however has always been terrible so after a great deal of pain trying to fly with a keyboard and mouse or a controller I give up, gun up and charge a beach. Or shoot at planes with a tank (known as duck hunting) or in some other way either try to avoid the pilot’s seat and take down the enemy’s air support. So when our simulator guru got an injury and had to go to the rear with the gear, I stepped forward and boldy stated “I’ll give her a shot.” Since nobody else stepped forward they let me! Hence my journey to fighter ace of Damage Inc. began.
Storyline:
WWII. Americans. Our most historically important battles where air superiority on one side or the other won the day. So of course we start in a little harbor in Hawaii known as Pearl and a date that would live in infamy. We follow Reaper Leader, a fresh arrival to Pearl who is going through flight training and waiting for his brother to arrive when the Japanese attack. We then fly 20 missions over 10 historical locations with one thing deep in our heart, vengeance for our brother and the others lost on Pearl. Not all you actions are offensive, much like in the real war we were knocked back on our heels and playing defense to save our lives but as we know history and historically accurate information from the game tells use the day will eventually be ours. I’m not doing a plot spoiler here, this is middle school/junior high history stuff here folks!
Graphics and Sound:
The game graphics are very nicely detailed, particularly the aircraft and I can’t help but play every minute I can in the cockpit mode because the detail is so solid as to make you feel like you are there. The sound adds to this as you listen to the squawk on the radio, the sound of bullets tracing past you and the rev of your engine as you push or pull back on the throttle. All the visual and audio accuracy definitely lend themselves to the immersion into the game. The only problem I saw was some of the shadows were saw-blading, probably a sacrifice made for the benefit of the other graphics which is well worth it.
Gameplay:
This set came with the Saitek Pacific AV8r stick and the game was designed to work with it though playing with a controller is an option. Let me state this upfront: once you play it with the flightstick the controller is no longer an option anymore because it handles AMAZING. I am not one to throw all caps around all willy nilly. Quite the opposite, I hate all caps most of the time and get angered when it is used for more than one word at a time so my use of it should drive the point home. The AV8r is designed with the throttle in front of the stick which I thought at first I would find extremely awkward. However the stick comes with curved base legs designed to go around the thigh so that the flightstick comfortably rests in you lap.
So as one hand takes the stick the other takes the throttle and with this build it is an ambidextrous stick that is completely comfortable and pretty much as close to where the stick would really be in a cockpit short of putting it on a long pole to the ground between your legs. I would give riding on your leg a higher comfort level that counters location accuracy. After that pretty much all the controls are intuitive which is amazing considering all the controls are just the controller buttons put in the right place for triggers, buttons and switches.
Even the thumb button at the top of the stick designed to simulate looking out you side and upper windows is so intuitive and well programmed to the game that I would push the thumb controller down and to the right, look out my “window” on the television screen in the lower right hand corner, see my target at two o’clock low, release my thumb from the stick, pull back on the throttle and swing my nose sights down toward the enemy before giving it a second’s thought. It was intuitive and performed just as smooth as I did with the stick. If I got too excited and over compensated for it’s location I would miss and have to swing back to correct, if I had time.
If I had time. That became a running theme in my gameplay because the odds were often stacked against Reaper Leader and if you made a big enough mistake the mission would be a scrub. On some missions I would think I was Top Gun material all the way only to have one lowly bomber slip through my net of flying bullets to drop their load in the pickle barrel. I curse, roll my plane firing, maybe kamikaze into the back of the enemy bomber then reset at checkpoint and start again. You can’t argue with letting a single bomber slip by, because that is what happened at Hiroshima.
You just have to be grateful for a checkpoint, swing your plane around, throttle up and start racing the onslaught. The gameplay is addictive enough that you are willing to try “just one more time” until that one more time amounts to over an hour. Comfortable seating arrangements in a chair approximately 6 feet from your television at the most (about the length of the controller cord) is ideal because time will fly past and if you sit just the right distance away you really feel like you are in a cockpit, I used a reclining arm chair reclined just enough so that my legs were slightly forward but the back was up, with the controller in my lap and I was stunned when someone would talk to me from the other room, how the hell did they get all the way up here?!?
I would get that immersed, seriously forget about the outside world and worry about the mission at hand, protecting the hospital from the bombers, protecting our bombers from bandits, dog fighting my way through whole squadrons. At the end of the mission you are rewarded with a historically accurate reaccount of how the battle took place and resulted using archive historical footage narrated by one of the voices from the game.
Multiplayer:
I expect this to probably be the most popular game mode once people get accustomed to the game offline on their standard missions. Dog fighting is the cornerstone of aerial combat and though it doesn’t play into effect near as much today as it did when the British Royal Air Force was started and whoever ruled the air won the battle, during WWII it was still pretty true and the better pilot could often win out against a superior aircraft opponent.
So I expect that there will be pilots who get the best plane they can the quickest they can (the equivalent to a noob tuber in a FPS) and there will be those who take the crankiest most unyielding planes built for war and try to get their D/K through sheer skill. GameStop pre-orders got a Black Widow added to their arsenal and players who pick up the collector’s edition get a Corsair ready to tear the enemy to shreds. All I say is give me a Hellcat, my AV8R and turn me loose. I will need a napkin to clean the foam from the corners of my mouth. Actually my favorite modes will probably be the co-operative or larger team matches, I tend to be a team player and would go down fighting if it saved my wingman.
Squadron Leader’s Edition:
If you are able to score this over the Collector’s Edition you won’t gain an in-game advantage but you will have one of the nicest 1:48 scale die cast metal Hellcats ever made that comes with two stands, adjustable weapons and landing gear and an opening canopy. This doesn’t improve your gameplay but it does improve your desk and if you have a kid or are just a kid at heart, this is one nifty durable toy as well as a model and improves your imagination play as you use it to gun down your least favorite people on TV.
Last Call:
This isn’t anywhere near a last call on the game for me, but nuts you have to write it up sometime. Damage Inc. Pacific Squadron WWII is excellent, great graphics and sound, terrific control, intuitive layout and when you match it with the Saitek stick your enemy is in a world of hurt and you finally understand why all your friends like flight sims. When you are swinging your nose around and angling your enemy into your sights, start firing your guns and watch pieces start tearing off your enemy’s aircraft, your body in-tune with your ride through the sweet action of the flightstick, you just want to keep playing. So you had better set alarms on your phone for when you want to stop or you just won’t. Don’t think I am done with the flightstick either, I see many mad experiments in it’s future…
Trailers:
Gallery:
