Pacific Storm Allies is the first follow up/add on to Pacific Storm. Like it's predecessor, Pacific Storm Allies is a historical game set in the pacific theater during World War II that combines three different genres into a single game; aspects of real time strategy, tactical war game and arcade style aircraft simulation genres can all be found in Pacific Storm Allies.
Game Details
- Publisher: Buka Entertainment,CDV
- Developer: Lesta Studio
- ESRB Rating: T
- Genre: Historical Real Time Strategy
- Theme: World War II
- Pros: Excellent blend of strategy and action game play; Wide range of unit types including land, sea and air units; Arcade mode to get into battles faster.
- Cons: Cheesy voice overs/acting; Strategic mode starts out very slow, too long for first battle.
There are three playable countries in Pacific Storm Allies, the United Kingdom is added to the United States and Japan which were available in the original Pacific Storm. In addition, as the title suggests, the game also includes new allies, Germany for Japan and the Netherlands and USSR for the US and UK countries. The addition of these allies expands and enhances game play and historical scope of the game.
Pacific Storm Allies includes all the hallmarks of a turn based strategy game. In this phase of the game you'll need to manage resources, allocate research for technological advancement as well as manage bases, ships, men, aircraft and other units. This portion of the game is spent building your empires resources and establishing allies through diplomacy. Once you've decided on a plan or specific battle you'll move into a deployment phase where units can be selected and positioned inside certain zones of a battle map. Once deployment has been completed you'll move into the real time tactical portion of the game. The tactical portion is where the game turns into more of a real time strategy game. In this phase you'll command your army by managing base and giving orders to units. The real time portion of the game has been upgraded over Pacific Storm with greater depth in orders, units and other options that control how battles play out.
Once a battle is underway Pacific Storm Allies gives you the option to switch views and take control of a specific unit in real time. The hopes of this is to take direct control of a unit to help your battle plan succeed. However, depending on your actions this can just as easily cause your battle plan to fail. Units that can be controlled include troops, aircraft and now naval ships.
Pacific Storm Allies contains both single player and multiplayer game modes. The single player game mode include a training mode (tutorial), free campaign, historical campaign, tactical missions and battle planner. The campaigns and missions can be played in a special "arcade mode" that removes all of the strategic management aspects of the games and gets players into the action much faster without slowing them down with strategic management aspects.
There are some things that should be pointed out however; voice acting is terrible and downright cheesy and the tutorial was quite difficult to understand at times. The biggest problem that I had with Pacific Storm Allies was the amount of time it took me to get into a battle when playing a campaign in strategic mode. It took 2+ hrs on the first attempt and that wasn't being as detailed with empire management as I could have been. Overall though Pacific Storm Allies has some very nice additions and is very detailed. The graphics have also been upgraded and look excellent. These and the different game-play styles make Pacific Storm Allies well worth it.
