Intriguing premise that somehow fails to hit the mark.
The basic premise is very interesting for me, being a history graduate: in the game universe, the 1920 Washington Naval Treaty was never ratified, and the Pacific War that broke out in reality on Dec. 7, 1941 instead happened in the 1920s before the rise of the aircraft carrier and submarine as the dominant naval weapons across the vast Pacific Ocean. As a result the two major Pacific powers, Imperial Japan and the United States, would have fought the kind of war the two Naval General Staffs planned on in 1941 with two fleets of battleships fighting a Jutland-style battle of dreadnought against dreadnought at almost beyond-the-horizon ranges.
What should be the core of this game, the battleship-on-battleship fights, are limited to a screen where the two fleets are represented on each side, with limited battle damage and weapons fire graphics. This setup works on handheld platforms like the Advance Wars series on the Gameboy Advance, but is very underwhelming on all but the most ancient of desktop computers. If you are looking for a surface naval combat simulator, all I can say is keep looking.
The strategic screen isn't much better, with a limited tutorial and an instruction manual that reads like a brief overview than a manual. It is relatively easy to figure out how to form battle-groups at your fleet bases, for instance, but there is little to no information about what the different commander stats mean and how they influence command behavior. The task force range circles and color coding mean little in planning how far a given battlegroup will travel each turn (will that battle-group I sent from Seattle to Pearl Harbor arrive in two turn or seven?).
While the ground and air combat sections are secondary to the naval combat, there are some issues that render the game harder to enjoy for me. Even when tasked for and attack on a suitable target, I have yet to see any sort of attack by my aviation squadrons. The regiments on land seem to be locked into static command structures and can not be deployed outside of a given geographical area, even with sufficient transports. The problem is especially severe on the US side, as most of the fighting is being done across the Pacific Ocean in the Philippines when most of the best US forces are stuck in North America.
Overall, I enjoy the basic premise of the game and most of the strategic features of the game. What I have a little trouble swallowing is that for this game to have such a limiting graphical interface and a lack of support from the instruction manual. A game like this deserves better. I would recommend this game only to hardcore counterifactual history enthusiasts and hardcore wargame simulator fans.