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• Reviewed on: Xbox 360, 42" HP-PL4200N plasma TV
• Also available for: Window PC
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• The Good: A unique and entertaining combination of naval strategy and action; amazing sense of scale thanks to minuscule sailors running around the decks of ships, surprisingly easy to get into—once you've played through the tutorials
• The Bad: Action and strategy elements are so basic that they don't stand well on their own
• The Verdict: A one-of-a-kind naval combat experience, and proof that innovation in action and strategy games is far from dead
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It's 1942 and I'm somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean commanding an American naval fleet about to engage the Japanese in history's very first aircraft carrier battle.

I spot the initial wave of enemy fighters and bombers in the sky to the north, so small they appear no more intimidating than a flock of seagulls. Seconds later they're swooping down upon my armada, dropping thousand-pound bombs on the decks of my ships and releasing torpedoes into the ocean.

I order antiaircraft guns and flack cannons to fire up, and the squadrons of fighters I had on constant air patrol above my carrier begin engaging in perilous dogfights. A burning, smoking wreck of a Zero falls onto the deck of one of my destroyers and a fire breaks out. I send a third of the ship's crew to extinguish the blaze, and another third to seal up the compartments surrounding the gaping hole just opened on the boat's starboard hull by a Japanese torpedo bomber.

Enough is enough. I press left on the directional pad and suddenly find myself in the cockpit of one of the Avenger Navy fighters flying above my ships. I spot the Japanese bomber heading away from the fleet and crank up the throttle to catch him. After a couple of minutes of dramatic aerial gymnastics that involve barrel rolls, loops, and daring dives towards the surface of the ocean, I manage to clip my foe's wing with machine gun fire and his plane bursts apart, spiraling in flaming, smoking pieces towards the water.

I level out my fighter and see the Japanese fleet dead ahead. A quick check of my ammunition supply reveals a single torpedo. I fly straight for one of the enemy carriers, only a few feet above the surface of the sea. It's a suicide mission, but worth it if I can tear a hole in her belly before my plane is blown apart.

There's nothing more I can do here, so I leave my brave pilot to do his job, pressing left on the directional pad once more to find myself at the helm of a submarine….

A game of strategic genre compromises

Battlestations Midway is a unique experience. It can be played almost entirely as a strategy game, with the player examining maps and status screens and issuing commands to the crews of ships, planes, and submarines, or as an action game, with the player taking first-person control of boat guns or flying a fighter or bomber. Most wisely, it's played as a mixture of both.

The downside of mixing these two genres is that they've each been dumbed down a fair bit to keep players from getting bogged up in details.

Piloting a plane is a piece of cake—all you have to do is control air speed and aim your fighter at what you want to shoot. Targeting enemies with artillery, torpedoes, and AA fire from a ship is similarly simple; just point and pull the trigger. Weapons don't overheat, bullets are in limitless supply, and it's hard to miss your target…in other words, it's exciting and satisfying but a little low on authenticity.

Ditto for the strategy. There simply aren't enough units to command—maybe four or five squadrons of planes and a half dozen ships in the most complicated missions—to formulate complex tactics, and the options associated with each unit are essentially limited to 'move here' or 'attack there'—save attending to ship damage, which involves assigning crew to look after various issues like mechanical problems, fires, and floods. We lack the ability to produce or replace units, and we have little choice over the ships we can take into battle. Simply put, die hard strategy fans will find Battlestations Midway lacking.

But this over-simplification seems a necessary evil. Had developer EIDOS' designers overloaded each segment of the game with a myriad of options things could have become overwhelming in a hurry—my multitasking abilities were already pushed to their limits as I constantly switched from cruiser to bomber to u-boat to map. Indeed, the 90-minute long tutorial is proof enough that Battlestations Midway has a fairly high learning curve, despite the straightforwardness of its individual activities. It was only in online play—which had a tendency to make me focus on just one element of the game, like flying a single plane or commanding a pair of ships—that I felt the over-simplification had a serious impact on the game's depth.

Graphics that evoke Hollywood special effects

Regardless of which of the game's many activities you happen to be engaged in, Battlestations Midway always looks great.

I've never seen more realistic naval ships in a video game. Much of it is due to the artists' attention to detail—it seems as though they didn't miss a single rope, propeller blade, or radar dish. But more important are the sailors. Each ship is populated with scads of tiny crewmen walking along the decks, manning guns, and talking to one another. They're so small that I would guess they'd appear as little more than blobs of colour on a standard definition screen, but they're detailed enough and so fluidly animated that they could compete with the realism of the type of teeny CGI soldiers seen in epic Hollywood war movies.

While the boats and their crews are Battlestations Midway's highlight, the rest of the game is none too shabby. The opening battle in the short 11 mission campaign sucks the player into a startlingly realistic recreation of Pearl Harbour, complete with beautiful island scenery, blazing ships, and smoke filled skies. World War II navy buffs will be in heaven.

Innovation isn't dead

I hesitate to use the word 'important' when describing a videogame, but I think it legitimately applies to Battlestations Midway. It's important to the industry because it shows developers that there are exciting new ways to approach the largely stagnant genres of air combat and strategy games, and it's important to gamers because it proves that we should neither anticipate nor settle for the status quo.

Battlestations Midway isn't the best game I'll play this year, but its innovations will undoubtedly be present in my mind as I evaluate every other military-themed game I play.