One on Ones
Ok, perhaps things are better over on the Japanese side? Let's try being Japanese and torpedoing some carriers…except you can't. Unbelievably, there are no carrier based torpedo carrying planes for either side. How can this be? Try the Pearl Harbour mission as a Japanese pilot and you get some tiny 60lb bombs to scratch the ship's paintwork with but not one single torpedo. Even in the Battle of Midway missions, the first and largest carrier battle where aircraft played a massive part in a long range war, you don't get a torpedo bomber. For a game that is based on the Pacific war, this is an almost unforgivable omission.
Ok, how about we forget the single missions with their bugged autopilots and total lack of variety, lets forget the career missions with their bugged autopilots, tedious flight times and incompetent AI. Lets go for some quick missions to see how various planes do against each other.
Hmm, I want to fly something I've not flown before, so lets jump in the F6F and go up against a Zero. Ok, so he's out-turning me, my best bet is to use my plane's superior weight against his light and underpowered plane. I'll dive away from him, pick up speed quicker and come back in for another pass. Oh, he's still right behind me. Ok, let's redline this baby in the vertical, then loop out at the bottom…. Eh? He's STILL about 6 feet behind me?
Now I'm no expert and don't claim to be, but from all the biographies and technical data that I've read in the past, this just isn't right. Zeros just can not do high speed dives and stay as manoeuvrable as this game seems to think they can. Sure, they can out turn just about anything in the sky, as US pilots found to their cost early on in the war, but the Zero is relatively slow and suffers from overly light controls which lock up at high speed. So there is something seriously wrong with the flight dynamics there.