Pacific Strike

The Good
Pacific Strike excels in immersing the player in its story. You are a fresh American soldier during the bombing of Pearl Harbor in WWII. Depending on your success in each mission, the story unfolds in paths that can change the course of history. Do well enough and you can end the war without the US having to drop the bomb on Japan.

There are two main parts of the game--playing the missions, and watching the story unfold through cinematic cutscenes between missions. The flight-sim portion of the game does have some "simulation" aspects, but overall it's more on the fun/action end of the spectrum. Very similar in style to the first two Wing Commanders, Strike Commander, and Wings of Glory.

The music composition deserves props. Both the MT-32 and General MIDI implementations sound fabulous. FM music sounds understandably inferior, but not bad at all if you don't have a MIDI card to compare it to.

Unlike other WWII flight sims of the time, Pacific Strike uses a vibrant color palette that visually brings the game to life. You can almost feel the sun beating on your skin and smell the salt in the air.

The Bad
When this game was released, a high-end system was a 486DX2-66, and Pentiums were brand new and unaffordable for most people. The problem is, this game, with details turned up, was mostly unplayable on the fastest 486. When the action would heat up in a mission, expected framerates were far less than 10 FPS. Even the fastest Pentiums in 1994 had framerate issues at points in the game. The game becomes much more playable on Pentiums over 100Mhz. Today, this can be controlled by DOSBox or using an appropriate retro PC.

The other major issue with this game is that digital sound effects only play one at a time. So for example, when you fire your guns, the engine sound cuts out. It's quite disconcerting, and perplexing how a company of the stature of EA/Origin allowed something like this to happen in a released game.

There are other minor bugs in the game that were not addressed by multiple patches. For example, occasionally when you launch your aircraft from a carrier, the plane will inexplicably belly-flop into the sea, rather than climb, and you die.

Lastly, the sky and water textures are not well-implemented. Not only are they blocky, but they severely reduce the already-bad framerate, and also make it much more difficult to see other aircraft against the textured background. Just leave them off, even if you turn up all the other details.

The Bottom Line
Pacific Strike is a game that failed terribly when it was released, but it could have been great if they would have polished it more prior to release. But with the help of modern systems and DOSBox tweaking (or using a fast Pentium retro PC), the game can still be very enjoyable today, especially if you were a fan of the Wing Commander/Strike Commander games and enjoy the interactive cinema style of play.