Not all it could have been.
As the gameplay goes its short but not particularly sweet. The campaign isnt very long and probably wouldnt take many people long to finish it, if they can be bothered. I have to admit I found it more of a chore grinding on with the campaign rather than a pleasure. The A.I is truely terrible, dogfights are over before you can really get you teeth into them. Also when you are the flight leader, the whole flight flies in formation all the time! which means its very easy for the enemy to get on your tail and open a can of whoop ass on your er.....ass. And dont count on your wingmen to bail you out (ahem, welcome to pun city), because they wont, they much prefer to continue to fly in formation with you until you end up doing a good impression of a firey earth bound comet. On the Naval side of things, pressumably to try to appeal to non sim gamers they have tried to speed things up a bit in ship combat by cutting back on controls and tactical manovering and generally dumbing down the whole experience. Quite simply it doesnt work, it doesnt feel realistic and it feels like its a square peg in a round hole (please eidos just leave the naval games to the sim heads, they dont work any other way as you have just proved). And as for the budding sub mariners out there steer well clear, if you ever wondered what a psuedo realistic sub shoot em up was like then by all means pick this one up otherwise dont bother. Im finding it difficult to find words that can convey to you how badly subs have been portrayed (or maybe betrayed would be a more apt word) in this game. Imagine a game that is totally the opposite to silent hunter 3, one lacking so much depth and an experience that finds you blowing all tanks and abandoning game hopefully to be rescued by good old H.M.S Desktop. Enough said on that!. In general the strategic elements to this game are minimal, the developers seem to be running on the assumption that you can be in every unit simultainiously as that can be the only possible way to command the units (in single player that is) effectively. As soon as you leave a unit and "jump" into another, the unit you were previously commanding will revert back to the A.I and just sort of stumble around not really doing a hell of a lot. For example having launched a flight of aircraft and taken them to the attack site, it was necessary for me to jump back to the base to set up another attack, what do I see on the map as soon as I leave the flight!! they all turn around and head for home!!!!!, and any flight you dont seem to be directly controlling always seem to end up circling your air base, on the naval side contnue in the last player controlled direction pressumably unitl they run aground. Compound all of this by having to fly using a mouse and you are in for a really shockingly unresponsive experience. It feels like a console game, for me there are some types of game which dont work on consoles and this is one of those types. Its a total no brainer.
However I find myself thinking that this is not what a game should be all about. Developers these days seem intent on inflicting us with very pretty but dull games, at what point did gameplay become a non essential after thought? They seem to be relying on multiplayer mode and nothing else, So ill give gameplay a three because it feels like an after thought and isnt very engrossing.
The graphics are possibly the only saving grace for this game, they are very good. Plenty of shiney eye candy. Great models and even the ships have small animations of crew members moving around on them, but if you are going to do that then they need to be done properly, for example if you hit and area with these tiny animated crew members, rather than see them fly in many different directions they just suddenly disappear. The games camera angles are sufficient but nothing special, The backgrounds and environments arent that great, but then its quite a sparse area so you cant expect to much there i suppose. The cut scenes are well done and enjoyable to watch, if you can stand all the american gung ho bull **** being dished out by the bucket load. But as far as naval games go it looks good. Ill give it an eight there.
The sound isnt anything special, its adequate and nothing more. Again if you can handle the ham salad acting then it does the job well enough. So ill give it a five.
Is it value for money?, hell no! ive been seriousy stiched up here. Eidos have released some shallow half arsed efforts before but surely this is the contender for the crown of crap. I did expect alot more from a company that have on ocassion produced some quite excellent titles, they really havent done themselves amy favours here. I think they have sold us short on this one. Feels like a classic MTV gen title rather than a next gen. I cant even congratulate them on a brave innovative attempt, as I firmly believe that developers in general are trying to take the gaming industry in a direction that wont be good for it. They seem to want to bash the individualism out of gaming, to use a theoretic comparison it would be like the car industry scrapping all different car models and making everyone have a electric car that looks the same and is the same colour as all the rest. Welcome to politically correct gaming. And a final thought its bordering on fraudulant advertising to catagorize this game as an RTS, check your sin bin for this one.