Battlehawks 1942: Turkey Day

We continue the Battle of the Coral Sea with another attack on a Japanese carrier, this time the Shokaku. I swear if this wasn't historical record, I'd complain about how on the nose it is. The background is, concurrently with the sinking of the Shoho, the Shokaku and the Zuikaku began an attack on what they thought was an American carrier and a heavy cruiser, but was actually a destroyer and a fuel tanker. The Japanese first launched a futile night attack on the Lexington and Yorktown, before the big battle, in which all of the previously mentioned ships, save the Zuikaku, are under attack.

The first is the Shokaku, and this time, I get to be the escort. Make sure two bombers hit their targets. Note, hit, not survive. Hitting is the only important factor. And the enemy selection is reasonable, four fighters. There's really no encounter in which they don't get damaged at least. I just need to get on them quickly enough to prevent the bombers from becoming too damaged.

Also, game, what gives? You didn't register my missions in the first section of Coral Sea, but this causes me to actually have a career? It turns out that if you change any aspect of the mission, it prevents that mission from tracking. I was generally switching the AI to the medium difficulty, Veteran rather than Ace. I get the principle behind the forced choice, since I have the option to give myself unlimited ammo and health, but changing the difficulty? That's a pretty bad choice, considering that the first time around I didn't even realize that was a problem. It's really something you should actually bother to mention.

It gets better. Each career can only have 16 missions played. That's not won, that's total. Get stuck completing a mission sixteen times? Too bad. This is the worst of both worlds, it feels like someone hacked in a campaign to some game centered around single missions. Either make it a true campaign or just toss me random missions, don't halfway do both things.

Eventually, with a helping of luck, I manage to win. I'm hitting the limitations of mouse aim for this game, and I sense this is only going to get worse as I continue. The Japanese side of the equation, of course, makes me defend the Shokaku against vile American bombers. How do I fair?

Well, better, if only just. The Zeke is the first plane in this game that doesn't make me feel like I'm actively fighting gravity. It isn't surprising that I have trouble against the Japanese. Unfortunately, I'm not getting the same sort of agility they are, the AI must either get subtle help or they automatically avoid stalls. I can tell because the hostile planes don't have my troubles.

The plane selection is, four fighters escorting two bombers. Basically a sort of reverse of the mission I just played, only I get an ally! That's right, helping me fight is another actual, friendly plane. What wonderful contributions does he make to the fight? If you guessed gets shot down five seconds into combat, then watches as the Shokaku gets blown up and I get shot down, you win. Still, it's nice that the fight part of the game is actually the challenge rather than me having to nail the enemy in the opening salvo.

For once, I'm actually having fun flying around. Dogfighting is actually fun, even if you really can't string a campaign around just that. It's nice, for just one moment before I realize how truly well screwed I am. See, it took me a moment to figure out the complete scope of the level. The opening group is one fighter, then the two bombers, my compatriot goes after the bombers, gets shot down. Fair enough. So I take out one of the two bombers and then decide to get in a dogfight. After I've shot two American pigdogs, I see two more planes diving towards the Shokaku. The only difference between this and the Shoho is that the game pretends that my ally dying a few moments in is actually a help.

Next up, the Americans protect the Lexington. To remind you of the history record, the USS Lexington was lost in this battle. Does that mean this is going to go the same as the last mission? This one's very different. You get placed above and to the side of an attack group of six planes, two escorts and four green bombers which I didn't realize were bombers until two tries in.

When I realize that, well, I get it in one. Turns out these bombers don't have guns in the back, and even if they have fighter cover, I can just get on a plane's tail and open fire. Literally the easiest mission I've played so far, why is this labeled hard? Is this game about to try to hurt me worse than it just did?

And the answer is that I just need to do a simple torpedo bombing mission. The problem? Torpedoes are finicky things to use. I wrote them off at first, but they actually require precise speeds and heights in order to hit the enemy ship. You have to fly very low and very slow in order to hit the ship. It's tricky to slow yourself down without it being a dramatic affair. Slowly going down to say, 75 feet above the water at 75 MPH, is something that takes some fine-tuning. Under fire? Well, let's just hope your plane has a tailgun.

The Kate torpedo bomber you get has no front guns, but does have a rear gun. That makes the last mission weird, did I just get lucky? That's unusual here. This mission is just a matter of not getting gunned down by the one enemy fighter, who will be gunning for you if you dive. Fortunately, once you have torpedo bombing down, it's easier than regular bombing.

Finally, it's time to defend the Yorktown. Now, what horrible foes do I have to fight? What insurmountable odds do I have to protect against? Nine bombers, no escorts. The fly in groups of three, and I have a fellow fighter. This is actually quite easy assuming I don't get so bogged down with the first group to get down to under a thousand feet. This is why you bring fighter cover, so one enemy plane doesn't get eight kills and one wounded.

Attacking it is a bit trickier, but not that difficult, outside of the usual problems hitting a ship with a bomb. You get two fellow bombers, one of which tries to act as an escort, and two groups of two American fighters. Your fellows are basically there to blow up the enemy ship, the fighters all go after you. In addition, they cheat. Because the player has to switch to the rear gun to shoot from the rear, if you're in the pilot position, they'll charge, if you're in the rear gun position, they'll stay out of range. They are cheating, but if you constantly switch between rear and front positions in the dive, you can cheat the cheat AI.

Since we're running a little bit short, let's see the first part of the Battle of Midway. Midway Island is the center of the action here. The Japanese's head admiral, Isoroku Yamamoto, devised a plan to eliminate the American's Pacific Fleet. As in, completely eliminate it. While there is a lot of talk of how America's industrial capacity would be able to respond to this and put out another fleet, the fact is, the morale loss of having your forces decimated would probably cause the Americans to reconsider a lot of things.

The first mission comes deep into the actual battle, when the Americans spotted the Japanese carrier Akagi without combat air patrol. Yet, this is a moderately difficult mission. Why? Good question. There's a friendly plane next to you and four or five hostiles, but the enemy is so far away that they never have a chance of reaching you before you've dropped the bomb.

I've also figured out a sort of workable plan to dropping a bomb. The manual tells you to drop the bomb when you turn level at the end of a dive. This presumably has some real world reason that isn't translating into the game. Either because of the flak attacks or because the pilot of the enemy ship goes "Hmm, they've dropped a bomb, better turn". In-game, however, these aren't a factor, what is a factor is you being able to hit the target with the bomb. The ships don't turn that much, so a bomb dropped from five thousand feet is basically just a matter of figuring out where it'll go, which I can much easier than from a dive.

The Japanese side is playing as a lone plane against five bombers. In contrast to the last fight against bombers mission, this one is impossible, and impossible for a reason. Everything is all about placement. There are two bombers to start with, and you're given what I presume is just enough distance to reach and shoot down the first group, by which point you have to get lucky and catch the second group as they dive down. I'm just theorizing, I have zero chance of winning this at any point.

So far the game seems to be trying to keep itself balanced, to mixed success. The American side, more than once, feels like the developers threw softballs at the player and then pretended it was an actual mission, while the Japanese side threw nothing but hardballs. I get they're trying to show each battle from both sides, but it isn't working.

This Session: 3 hours 20 minutes

Total Time: 4 hours 50 minutes