Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

10 Hours or Less

The Bottom Line:

"Total letdown"

This game is just plain bad. I was expecting it to be like the History Channel's Civil War game, not perfect, but still solid. This is a great let down coming from that game. I'm not sure were to start, there is allot to be said about this game. However very little of that what there is to say is good.

I will however start with the two good thing this game has to offer. Firstly the graphics are decent, not the best, but more than simply acceptable. They are smooth, clean, and the lighting is good. However as I will cover below, they are not all good. Secondly the fairly unique nature of this game, a World War II game set in the Pacific Theater rather than Europe, allows for some different weapons than what a typical WWII FPS has to offer.

Now that I have stated the only two good things about this game I will tell you the bad aspects of those good things. Firstly the graphics, the frame rates usually decent, but when you get more than a half dozen people with automatic weapons on screen the frame rate suffers greatly. This is only an occasional problem as most of your own men have semi-automatic weapons and there are rarely more than ten Japanese on screen at any time, several of whom have only bolt-action rifles. Now the down side of the unique weapons, there are only three of them. A bolt-action rifle, very similar to the Russian Mosin-Nagant that you may be familiar with from games like Call of Duty. Then there is the submachine-gun, also very similar to a gun you may be familiar with, the Sten. Last is a fully automatic machine gun, once again you may find yourself asking, "Have I seen this gun before?" The answer is, "no," however it is very much like the Bren.

In addition to these minor flaws the game has a number of other, more major flaws. These include a number of historical inaccuracies, poor voice acting, a lack of a story beyond the history, generally mediocre game play, and last, but most certainly not least, it is short, very, very, very short. It took me three and a half ours to slug my way through the game on easy. Also many of the XBox Live achievements are not worth getting as they require ridiculously high number of kills, and or wins to get them as they are online achievements. I personally did not play this game online, I decided I could not stomach suffering through anymore of this game.

I am a lover of history, so it may have been the number and quality of the historical inaccuracies that led to my giving this game such a low score. I will now endeavor to list the most noteworthy inaccuracies. First is the American uniforms. In reality the United States Marines fought all of the battles in this game, as they do in this game. However they wear the uniforms of United States Army soldiers fighting in Europe, very different conditions that required very different uniforms. This next one is not specifically a historical error, but also a realism error. The anti-aircraft guns are simply wrong. They reminded me of the gun turret that Luke Skywalker used in the original Star Wars film to defend the Millenium Falcon from the TIE Fighters when they were escaping from the Death Star. Fun as they are I am sure that they are less than accurate. The last error I shall note is that many of that the Americans did not use the Thomson submachine gun with a twenty round clip as they did in this game, they used a thirty round clip. This is an error common in recent WW II games, but it annoys me, and I will mention it in this review for this game, regardless of how relevant it truly is. Those are not the only historical errors, but rather the only ones I will mention to spare you a long drawn out list.

I can not in all good and honest truthfulness recommend this game as even worthy of renting. It is bad, don't encourage Activision and the History Channel to make bad games by buying this one. It isn't the worst game I have played, its close, but not quite the worst. Save your money, don't buy or rent this game, simply live your life like you did before you knew it existed.