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Pacific Storm: Allies

	Author: Sean Drummy Article Type: PC Game Preview Publication Date: 1/20/2008 Developer: Lesta Studio Publisher: CDV USA (USA) Publisher: Buka Entertainment (Europe) Related Categories: World War II, Air Combat, Real-time, First Person Shooter, Pacific Theater, Strategic, Tactical, Online or Multi-Player, Single-Player, Naval Combat, Submarine Combat, Simulation

Ever since The Wargamer had the opportunity to look at CDV and Lesta’s action/strategy blend, Pacific Storm, we’ve been impressed by the ability of this Europe-based team to strike a fine balance between historical realism and arcade action. Sure, wargamers love to blow stuff up, but they also like to feel like that killing blow was brought about by at least a semi-realistic series of events. Throw in a grand strategy-level layer to allows gamers to build units, bases, and just about anything under the sun or research top secret projects (Atomic bombs, anyone?), and you’ve got a pretty addicting combination.

More than Just a Bullet List of New Features

Pacific Storm: Allies brings more than just a neat bulleted list of new features and content (although the bulleted list I read through did look quite good at any rate). The anticipated expansion brings a whole new look and feel to tactical mode and plenty of new gameplay elements to the strategic layer of play. Most notably, Allies will come with plenty of new nations on both sides of this epic struggle: Japan will get aid from mighty Germany and the United States will have their British friends chime in, in addition to the Netherlands and USSR who play a less important role compared to the UK, but they nonetheless have a substantial role in the main campaign. The new nations are slightly abstracted from the campaign as the player can’t take direct control over their allies’ units and bases (with the exception of the UK which is wholly playable). Instead, players need to use cunning and diplomacy to cajole their fellow allies into helping them. This adds yet another interesting element to the strategic level of things that will later manifest itself on the tactical level when allies are (or are noticeably not) fighting alongside the player in a pivotal battle.

As for the scores of new features, changes, and improvements, I’ll touch on a few of them here, but bear in mind that there is much more coming with Allies than what I enumerate here.

Interesting features for Les Grognards:

• An intuitive and fairly realistic “hit location” system — Ships, aircraft, and even the stations on these instruments of war can be damaged individually. This new system, apart from being really cool, allows a certain amount of luck to enter in to the equation as certain portions of the ships are naturally more critical to the effectiveness of each ship. Once again historical accuracy comes in to the mix in full swing as the locations of fuel tanks, ammo stockpiles, navigation technology, etc. are all accurately modeled. This means with a lucky shot or two a ship can be severely debilitated instead of a bland “health meter” which slowly melts away as salvo after salvo pounds into a ship or aircraft’s hull.
• A substantially expanded and improved mod system — Players can now create a wide variety of different mods for the game which, of course, is always a big leg-up for the game’s community. Budding artists can really show their stuff with Pacific Storm: Allies as the ability to add new units comes hand-in-hand with the option to change unit skins, create new maps, and even new special effects. Additionally, there is plenty of support in the editor for creating custom missions.
• A significantly extended list of units — Pacific Storm: Allies delivers more than enough new content to keep existing players happy as 50 new aircraft are included in addition to modifications for the existing craft. Additionally, 20 new ships will be included with the final release.
• Four new types of buildings can be built at the strategic level — The new buildings coming with Pacific Storm: Allies all focus around the same concept—improving the quality of the wide variety of personnel involved in the war effort. This means that players will now have the option to create engineering academies, army academies, air force academies and naval academies which all, as one might guess, improve the performance and efficiency of their respective personnel.
• Plenty of new researchable technologies — The new technologies available in Allies actually present a number of promising possibilities. For one thing, new technologies open up new avenues of strategy for the player to explore. Concentrating in certain areas will most likely create an advantage over the enemy, but the concentration means that another field of research was neglected, leaving the player vulnerable in another area. More technology means more possibilities in this regard, which is definitely exciting. Also, the addition of new technologies opens up more possibilities when creating custom units. With extra weapons and navigations system available to aircraft, for example, the player has that much more freedom to pick and choose exactly how their forces will operate.