Ubisoft's Pacific Fighters

By Andrew Herd (13 November 2004)

bisoft have had us on a drip feed about this next installment in the Il2 Sturmovik saga for months now and the good news is that it has been worth the wait. Pacific Fighters whisks us from the icy steppes of the Soviet Union to the heat of the southern ocean, bringing with it new enemies flying new planes; but it is possible to install the new game 'into' an existing Forgotten Battles/Ace Expansion Pack setup and create some fascinating 'What if?' scenarios.

Anyone who has a copy of the Ace Expansion Pack will find it easy to imagine the look of the new game, which apart from the move of location, treads closely in the footsteps of its predecessor - which is to say that you get gorgeous aircraft models, spectacular ships, fine clouds (as long as two layers is your idea of real), so-so sea and just about acceptable land. There is no weather system to speak of, the interface is clunky and the music is still as cheesy as it ever was, but that's always been part of the fun of it. If an Il2 title suddenly sprouted photoreal buildings and a brushed steel look, the users would probably riot. As it is, if you are familiar with Forgotten Battles, a quick flip through the manual is all you are likely to need to get up to speed, there being a few extra display options, which we will get to later, because the big news is that you get to take off and land on aircraft carriers.

Yep, this game gives you the most realistic carriers I have seen in a sim and not just the usual 'ship shaped island' variety - these mothers not only move, they will run you down if you miss the wire and don't firewall the throttle soon enough. When you are waiting to take off, the decks heave gently up and down and you even have to remember to unfold your wings if you start near the back on a crowded flight deck. Landing on a carrier is not easy, especially when you have a damaged plane and although tutorials are included with the game, I suggest doing some trial flights if you intend to land without assistance from the 'autopilot'. It took me a couple of dozen landings before I could reliably take the early wires and that is despite being used to operating from a short grass strip in real life - however I had a lot of fun learning. It says something for the flight models that each plane needs a slightly different technique to get it down safely, although the fundamentals are the same; and of course, you don't have to worry about crosswind when you are landing on a flightdeck.

According to the blurb, there are over 40 new planes, but in common with earlier Il2 games, around half of them are variants, so the actual list for the Japanese is: Aichi D3 Val, Kawanishi H8K Emily, Kawanishi N1K1 George, Kawasaki Ki-61 Tony, Mitsubishi A6M Zero, Mitsubishi G4M1 Betty, Mitsubishi Ki-46 Dinah, Nakajima B5N Kate and Nakajima Ki-43 Oscar. The Allies get: a Supermarine Seafire (and a Spitfire), Bristol Beaufighter, Bell P-39 Airacobra, Grumman F4F Wildcat, Grumman F6F Hellcat, Vought F4U Corsair, Grumman TBD and F Avenger, Douglas A-20 Havoc, North American PBJ Mitchell, Boeing B-17, Consolidated B-24 and the Boeing B-29. I can hear the cheering at the news that the B-24 has made it into an Il2 game at long last, because it has been noticeable by its absence, given that it served in greater numbers than the B-17, but I guess that the Superfortress will be the plane everyone will want to take on. If you liked the planes in the Ace Expansion Pack, you will love these, because they are modelled to the same high standard - although none of them quite reaches the level of artistry of the J8A in Aces, which qualifies as the best biplane warbird sim I have laid eyes on. Maddox have done a lot of work on the flying models, which are pretty good now, with much more convincing stalls and spins and handling at critically low airspeeds is spot on. The biggest disappointment here is that none of the four engined bombers are flyable, nor for some reason are the TBD and F. The Boeings I can understand, but the TB seem a strange omission from the flying list, given that it was one of the most common planes in the theater. On the Japanese side, you can fly the Val, the Zeros, the Oscar and the Dinah... as far as I can tell, but it took some flipping around the menus to find out, so I may have missed some.

Needless to say, there are plenty of ships, including many different classes of carrier: American, British and Japanese; various cruisers and destroyers; the Prince of Wales, Duke of York and King George V battleships; landing craft; submarines; fishing vessels; a yacht and even a DUKW. There are too many locomotives, trucks and AA guns to detail and sixteen different maps, which make it possible to simulate almost every major action in the theater from Singapore and Hawaii, to Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal. In the beta, capital ships were a little thin on the waves, but there is so much else one could hardly complain and Maddox have an excellent record of supplying this kind of thing later on, hint, hint.

The artifical intelligence (AI) has come on by leaps and bounds since Il2 first hit the shelves and Pacific Fighters sets you up against some very convincing opponents in single player mode - try it once and you will never willingly go back to CFS3. Enemy fighters stay with the bombers, while their charges press home their attacks and then high tail it out just as fast as they possibly can. Needless to say, it isn't perfect all the time and I witnessed a hilarious moment where two formations of B-29s turned towards each other with disastrous results. One of the areas where the game falls down slightly is that the torpedo bombers are far too effective; in real life, they had to fly at a steady 150 knots at 150 feet before dropping their weapon, which gave naval gunners plenty of time to calculate deflection, assuming that the fighters didn't get there first. Torpedo bomber pilots did not generally live to be old and bold, or even old and cautious, because it was the nearest thing to a suicide mission available outside signing up as a genuine Kamikaze.

In case anyone doubts this, one of the most heroic actions of the war involved the launch of Naval Torpedo Squadron 8 in an attack at Midway, from which exercise only a single TBD returned - a sacrifice made more terrible by the fact that all those lost crews would have known very well that even when a torpedo was dropped perfectly, only about half were likely to run true, and most of those would miss because there was nothing more sophisticated to aim them than the pilot's eye. In the final analysis, this mission was a kind of aerial charge of the Light Brigade and the lesson was not lost on tacticians, who progressively switched away from torpedo attacks on heavily defended targets.

In the end, most ships that were sunk in the Pacific fell victim to iron bombs and so level bombing is once again a feature - and though you wouldn't suspect it if your experience was based on playing the campaign missions, most bombs were historically dropped by TBFs starting from 12,000 or even 15,000 feet and coming in at an angle between 45 and 60 degrees (the TBF made a lousy dive-bomber because it rapidly exceeded its Vne in a steep dive).

While we are on the subject of AI, tail gunners seem to have been toned down to realistic levels of accuracy, although they still have eyes like eagles and remain remarkably hard to kill; but muzzle flash on the bombers is still badly overdone, with the whole side of some of the planes lighting up like a Christas tree when the gunners fire. This is the only seriously silly special effect in the game and I can't imagine any users over the age of ten would vote for its keeping. The lack of armour in the Japanese planes, which were lightly built to increase maneuverability, is realistically modelled, as is the effect of their relatively light armament, which means you will need patience and fast reflexes if you plan on a career taking down B-29s in anything except the very late Japanese fighters.

As I commented earlier, terra firma is only represented in Il2 games as a platform to support airfields and things you can attack, and Pacific Fighters doesn't buck the trend. Even at the highest detail settings, you can hardly call the land realistic and you can forget the remarkable 3D effects that Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator promised before it was KIA. But, all this is acceptable in a game that is primarily about action - Maddox have taken great care not to put polygons where they will not be missed and when you are howling round on the edge of a stall with a Zero on your six, the state of the landscape is of academic interest only. However, as the game matures, the lack of more sophisticated weather is increasingly obvious by its absence, particularly the absence of any kind of wind or turbulence effects, which are a major feature of flying in the real world.

There are the usual options for graphics and sound, controlled via Il2's standard interface, which you will by now have learned to love or hate, if you own any earlier games in the series. This mother could do with a serious rethink, because it is sloooooow, counter-intuitive and the buttons look like someone designed them under the influence of strong drink and then threw them at the background, but it works, after a fashion. Browsing the manual revealed that you can turn off subtitles for pilot's voices, which is vital if you want to be able to use the mirrors with which many of the cockpits are fitted, as otherwise the rear view fills with text the moment you get into any serious combat.

Missions include a clutch of set piece single player flights, ranging from carrier take off and landing practice to the attack on Pearl Harbor. The next stage up is the dynamic single player campaign which can be played as a fighter or bomber pilot, of either side, with a choice of starting year. Creating a pilot and starting a campaign lets you fly a series of linked sorties, the result of each one influencing the next, which means that you must take care to achieve the best possible result each time if you don't want to see the odds mount against you. Campaign missions still take a long time to load, it sometimes isn't clear when you have achieved a result and finishing them with the limited ammunition option checked can be incredibly tough, but they are great fun. Close control of your subordinates is more or less essential if you want to progress, which is the place where an addon like Voice Buddy really shines, unless you have twelve sets of fingers and can do five things at once. One slight peculiarity of the game is that you can attempt a mission repeatedly and fail to get anywhere, then fly it one more time and get the 'completed' banner without appearing to have done any better than before, but I must be missing something. Combat missions are interspersed with recon flights, so be prepared to spend some time doing no more than watch and wait - I guess it all adds to the atmosphere.

The quick mission builder appears to be exactly as it was in Forgotten Battles, which means that there is still no easy way to organise bombers to fly in box formations, short of using the 'full' mission editor. When Il-2 Sturmovik first came out, box formations were hardly necessary, but now that we have three four engined bombers, the lack of a good way of persuading bombers into boxes is turning into a glaring omission and it would be great to see it incorporated into a future patch. This would be such a good demonstration of the game's inherent superiority over the competition, I am surprised Maddox haven't thought of it already.

Pacific Fighters UBI Soft Buy Now from Flightsim Central

I didn't have the time or opportunity to test online multiplay to any significant extent, but given that Maddox seemed to have more or less got the bugs out of it by the time Aces was released, I can't imagine it being a problem - beyond the massive increase in the maximum player limit. Whether 128 player dogfights will work okay remains to be seen, but the developers have worked hard to shut down the opportunities for cheating which were so troublesome in earlier games. The options for multiplayer missions and campaigns should also limit camping, an irritating phenomenon which has put off many would be participants in the past.

As far as stability goes, having got my hands on a copy of the shrinkwrap, it is clear that fun though the game is, the recently announced patch is sorely needed. This isn't completely unexpected, as previous releases in the Il2 series have required at least one and sometimes two patches to get them right - though it has to be said that in each case, Maddox have added extra functionality and sometimes new flyable planes as well. My setup, which runs on Windows XP Pro SP2 and has Pac Fighters installed into Forgotten Battles and the Ace Expansion Pack, will allow me to start planes on the carrier decks, but doesn't let the engines continue running, because they cut as soon as I stop pressing the 'I' key. Neither can I get the wheel brakes to release - I haven't tried every plane, but it certainly seems to affect many of the US shipboard fighters - and I can't get the gear to lower on the F4F and FM-2, which rules out doing carrier landings unless you enjoy skidding along flight decks on your belly. You can get around this particular problem easily enough by using autopilot mode, but unless my system is unique, this bug is going to annoy the hell out of a lot of people and I hope it gets fixed in the initial patch - because half the fun of the game is taking off and landing on the carriers and the F4F is one of the best planes in Pac Fighters. The beta also had some bugs in the campaigns which are said to have been cured, although I haven't had a chance to play enough missions to check whether this is the case or not... and the B29 damage model needs a bit of attention, because once or twice I had one go down tail first on me.

Three years down the line, the Il2 Sturmovik franchise looks remarkably mature in gaming terms. An FB/AEP/PF installation like the one I reviewed gives you the opportunity to fly a large proportion of the aircraft that fought in World War II: excluding minor variants, I counted over fifty. There are some noticeable omissions (mostly accounted for by Maddox not having got around to the relevant theater yet), such as the Hawker Typhoon and Tempest, early Luftwaffe bombers like the Dornier 17, and the majority of British bombers, but the scope of the series is awesome as it stands. I don't know what Maddox's intentions are, but it seems to me that if a Battle of Britain expansion pack also catered for the Norwegian campaign and the Blitzkrieg of 1939/40 - incidentally giving us the joy of trying to survive in such no-hopers as the Fairey Battle - and we had a D-Day/Battle of the Atlantic pack, there wouldn't be anything left. Fantasy? Well, there seems to be no stopping these guys and look how far we have come already. It doesn't matter which way you look at it, Il2 is a milestone in gaming terms and I gain the impression that Oleg and Ilya have no plans to give up on it yet.

As far as realism goes... well who am I to say, but I guess this is as near as you can get to actual air combat on a PC. I am old enough to have near relatives who saw combat in World War II and while I haven't asked any of them to try Pacific Fighters, I daresay they would be impressed with what they saw, allowing for the obviously unfixable lack of gravitational effects, which makes some of the maneuvers you commonly see executed in multiplayer noticeably unreal. The other observation my family have all made at one time or another is that most pilots who were shot down didn't see the plane that fired on them - because of this, the highest scoring aces often didn't use tracers so that they had a chance of a second burst, should they miss with the first (even the dopiest pilot can spot tracers whizzing past out the corner of his eye). If you haven't flown a plane, this will sound surprising, but take my word for it that quite large civil aircraft can be tough to spot at a distance of more than a few hundred yards, especially if they are coming straight at you and you aren't expecting to see them. When you combine the fact that combat aircraft paint schemes are specifically designed to be hard to spot with a lowered level of crew awareness after long flights, it isn't difficult to understand how many experienced pilots made a career out of stalking their quarry and closing in until their unsuspecting victim filled the windshield before they opened fire. Okay, so turning off all the icons in Pacific Fighters lets you get near to this situation, but the AI pilots and gunners are way better than they ought be at spotting trouble and they give the game away by making radio calls. Set against this is the fact that gamers have to cope with playing on a single screen; but since many WWII pilots had a restricted field of view anyway, hardware limitations aren't such a handicap as they are perhaps in Flight Simulator. This is one area of the Il2 franchise which could do with a makeover - an option to reduce sighting distances and crew alertness would be make the game hugely more realistic... if we could also have a flyable TBM and a reduction in that gunner muzzle flash.

One of my original criticisms of Il2 was that adding planes to it wasn't an option - and you still can't. On the other hand there is always the possibility of 'reskinning' the existing ones, which is a simple matter of dragging a downloaded skin file into the correct aircraft folder in the ...\paintschemes\skins tree that hangs under the Ubisoft directory. For some reason, Il2 skins don't seem to have made it onto FlightSim.Com, so right now the best source is Il2skins - Pacific Fighters skins are beginning to appear there already and I have no doubt that they will really start to rack up in the next month.

Verdict? Outstanding. People will talk about how good this game was in years to come and if you don't buy a copy now, you won't be able to join in. Exactly how long Maddox will be able to keep squeezing life out of this engine remains to be seen, but they have stayed at the top for three years now and they aren't showing any signs of slipping. Roll on the Battle of Britain.