After a gluttony of shooters and mind-numbing sports titles, Battlestations: Midway is a breath of fresh air that the Xbox 360 has been needing for some months. Don't let the World War II setting fool you, this game is like nothing you've played on an Xbox before. In fact, you may have never played a title like this on any platform before unless you can remember back to 1998's Wargasm from Atari and Digital Image.

 

Multi-Wargasmic

Like Wargasm, you can control units from a top-down real-time strategy interface or you can jump right into any of your vehicles and get your elbows dirty fighting enemies yourself. While in Wargasm you fought across the wastelands of a not-too-distant future on foot, in tanks and in airplanes, Midway takes place entirely on and over the oceans of the Pacific. So while you may miss out on the relatively few tank choices found in a game like Wargasm or Uprising, your thirst for vehicle variety should be slaked by the over 60 different ships and planes of the Japanese and American naval forces realistically modeled in the game. From Narwhal submarines and huge battleships to B-17 Flying Fortresses and Japanese Zeros, there isn’t much the developers have left out.

 

Sleeping Through School

 

While there isn't much content left out in regard to vehicles, the same cannot be said of the missions. The single-player campaign found in Midway is so short that it can be finished in a single afternoon. There are a few challenging missions for the different vehicle types, but they too can be played through in a matter of a few short hours. The single-player component that you will find taking most of your time is the game's tutorial, referred to by the developers as the Naval Academy. The “Naval Academy” may not just be a clever name for the game’s instructional walk through of its controls, but may in fact refer to the length of time it requires to complete the training. Admittedly the controls are relatively complex, but the tutorial doesn’t need to actually feel like sitting through four years of instruction at a military college where the professor left his personality and appreciation of time at sea. Getting through it took me longer than it did to play through all nine-or-so challenge missions, and so I wasn't too surprised upon being notified that I'd actually unlocked an achievement when I had finished it.

 

But once you wade through the tutorial, you will find yourself in a cleverly executed game that provides a wholly unique gameplay experience that cannot be found on any other platform at this time (excepting of course the PC version). Commanding fleets of ships, submarines and planes can be quite intense from both the top-down view and from within the cockpit or on the deck of your ship as well.

 

Cocky Seaman

 

The missions never feel repetitive and consist of tasks such as escort duty, defending an airfield from bombers, or stealthily sinking a convoy using your sub’s torpedoes. The game attempts to string them all together with a disjointed story about two competitive friends. As you follow their career through the war you play primarily as Lieutenant Henry Walker, a cocky seaman who seems to enjoy second-guessing all of his superiors. Still, he somehow works his way up the ranks. Whoop-dee-do. The thin story could be easily excusable if it weren’t for the terrible script and voice acting. In addition to that, the face of your character looks like it belongs in a more surreal game like Psychonauts, not a realistic WW II sim.

 

Nevertheless, if you can get past that, you will find yourself almost compelled to play through the entire single-player campaign in just one sitting. That’s not just because it is incredible fun, but also because it is only five or six hours long.

 

The Smell of Fresh Baked Cookies

 

This is my major complaint with this game. Overall it’s great, but where is the rest of it? It’s like coming home to a house that smells of fresh-baked cookies only to find that your mother has already taken them all over to the neighbor's.

 

Luckily though, you're friends with the neighbor's kid and you can head over there (by way of Xbox Live) and share a few cookies with him. With games allowing up to eight players at once, multiplayer matches can be massive affairs that consist of seemingly hundreds of ships and planes in a single battle. While the graphics aren’t great on the 360 version, they are easily forgivable when you see the sheer number of units on screen.

 

The Long and Short of it

 

Battlestations: Midway isn’t getting a ___ because it isn’t a good game, instead I feel it merits that because there isn’t enough of it there. The many multiplayer possibilities should buy you a lot of time with the title, but the single-player campaign is just entirely too short (while the tutorial is mind-numbingly long). However, if you play online with a group of friends that have the discipline to deliver coordinated attacks, this game is easily worth the next-gen price tag of the 360 version and is a steal at the $39.99 price tag of the PC version.