Battlehawks 1942 (1988)

Name:Battlehawks 1942
Number:250
Year:1988
Publisher:Lucasfilm Games (Lucasarts)
Developer:Totally Games
Genre:Flight Simulation
Difficulty:4/5
Time:8 hours 20 minutes
Won:No (111W/81L)

The first of Lucasarts four flight simulations, Battlehawks 1942 takes place during the Pacific Campaign of WWII, and lets you play as both the American and Japanese side in the follow-up battles after Pearl Harbor. In many respects, it's what you expect out of a Lucasarts game, but I found the experience to be one of the few disappointing titles to come from the company.

This doesn't necessarily mean it's the worst game to come out of the company. Even before rating this, I'm sure this will do better than the two previous titles I've rated on this blog. But I didn't really think those were going to go much beyond interesting ideas that failed thanks to the time period they were released in. This is a game in a genre I know will produce something very interesting in a year, not something I'm going in with little expectations. I expected more from a Lucasarts flight sim.

Part of the problem, I imagine, is that while the DOS/Amiga/Atari ST thing this has sounds all nice and futuristic in 1988, we're still talking about an era where sound cards were rare enough that this doesn't even have anything beyond PC Speaker. Just beyond the point where the C64 and Apple II were realistic competitors to the platform but before it could challenge the ST/Amiga meaningfully. Whenever the game shows above a certain number of planes, the game starts slowing down.

This could cut things down to how this is one of, if not the first flight sim to have a game world, as limited in detail as it is, with probably a dozen large objects being tracked and all their little bullets. The faults are comparable to the problems in a more modern game rather than the issues of having to figure things out. At the time, it would have blown everything else away, now we see the issues more clearly.

In-game information on the planes.

Reading the manual shows that they really were trying to make something grand about the game. It's nearly 150 pages long, and even if you cut it down to just gameplay aspects, it would still be forty pages at least. The designers really wanted you to go in knowing how these planes worked and the historical background of these battles. Even having a bibliography. The authors also bring up why they designed the game why they did, for the most part, and bring up a common criticism of modern air combat. See blip on radar, shoot missile, blip disappears.

The regular mission selection, left and right switch between the missions of a particular battle.

The game has sixteen tutorial missions and two campaigns, one for the Americans and one for the Japanese. Each campaign has sixteen missions. The campaigns have a weird design. Every mission is available at the start, assuming you've picked a pilot of the requisite nationality. You can play any mission in any order for as many times as you'd like, but once you reach sixteen missions on a particular pilot/career, that pilot is finished.

I see the admiral is looking very...young today.

This actually made a weird effect in how I played the game. Sure, I do get medals and promotions for completing a mission, but since I'm going to be replaying most missions over and over again, I just made a pilot for each mission. Functioned as a sort of weird indicator of how many tries it took before I either got a mission or gave up. The only time it didn't work was when I was unlucky enough to die, a situation that only happened a handful of times. This causes the pilot's campaign to end.

The hybrid approach to not quite having a campaign but not quite just being random scenarios is odd. What actions get you promotions and medals are sometimes at odds with what you have to do with the regular objectives. If you play through each mission once, you basically zip across places which you logically should not be able to do. Plus, there's nothing stopping you from going back in time like you've decided to turn this into a sci-fi game about setting the timeline right.

That said, this does work well at teaching you the game for the most part. The tutorials are entirely straight-forward and help get you used to the controls as much as possible. They're actually pretty good at least at first glance. Keyboard aiming is arrows, mouse aiming works fine, didn't test joystick aiming. I used mouse aiming primarily, which works like you'd think, except there are two problems.

Stalling is a constant problem. This could very well be realistic, but this ties into the trouble with both mouse and keyboard aiming. Keyboard aiming works where if you hold down the button, you get a delay between the initial pressing and the point where it starts moving constantly. When you stop, it holds over a bit. Like typing a letter on a keyboard in a program that's stopped responding properly. Borderline unplayable.

Mouse aiming is better, in that stalling below five thousand feet is not a death sentence. Instead, it's quite the workout for your wrist. Maybe a trackball is better for this sort of thing, or maybe I just should have pulled out my joystick. Everything is smooth and what I expect, it's just that you don't get a good range of motion with a mouse here.

"I know the ship got sunk, but you personally didn't hit it, so it doesn't matter."

The other problem is bombing sucks. This might be realistic. I'm not really an expert in WWII, something which I should probably change considering that this sort of thing is going to come up often as the years go by. (Like there's a downside to knowing about WWII in this sort of blog) However, unless you are trying to be REALLY realistic, not having a sight for bombing something is bad. And this does not hit that niche of being that realistic. There are just too many factors which are obviously not realistic that this feels annoying.

This was the most consistent problem the game had. Oh, sure, I would get gunned down on occasion and multiple missions felt impossible to win otherwise, but anytime a mission had me bomb something? My victories were entirely down to luck. Dive bombing was beyond me even by the end. Strategies I thought would work just didn't when I started up the next session. Torpedo bombing, which was just a simple case of following height and speed requirements, turned against me by the end.

Actual aerial combat was smooth and I never felt much issue with it. There were a few factors I didn't figure out until later. Like how Japanese weapons are supposed to be used, but this is a issue with the historical design of the planes and less something that can be worked around. That said, enemy AI is often simple and goes directly for whatever target will make you lose. Usually, this is you. The only time they don't do this is when this would be inconvenient for them or they need to distract you from another plane bombing your ship.

What about your friendlies? Well, friendly fighters might survive, if you babysit them, but for the most part, will get shot down and sink to the bottom of the ocean. Friendly bombers? You're the escort, even if you're also a bomber. Technically, they have an easier time of it, since most bombers have rear guns. Just hope that the enemy is sitting within range and within a certain area behind them.

A Zeke after having taken out a few Americans, note that the first bullets start from 600, and are lower comparatively to the cannon's starting of 60. I'm still probably too trigger happy.

There is considerable variation in planes and what they do, even within a class. The Japanese, for instance, use lower caliber machine guns, which in fighters they compensate for with higher caliber "cannons", which actually deal damage. Bombers just get stuffed. One American plane, which you are saddled with for a few missions, only has one front and rear machine gun, which also affects how much damage you do.

The average experience tailgunning.

Rear guns are interesting. The AI gets to use both front and rear guns at the same time, but you have to switch seats. This was rough to get used to at first, but once I got used to changing viewpoints, it was tolerable. Yes, there's a problem where you can suddenly stall or skate too close to the ground, but most of the time you're level enough that you don't need to worry about that. It has better aiming, about 45 degrees freedom left, right and up. This is true of the enemy too, meaning that attacking from below is actually not that stupid an idea.

At the risk of sounding like one of those people, this game is very Star Wars. I don't mean in terms of ethics, morality or anything like that. The planes feel like predecessors to the fighters in the X-Wing and Tie Fighter games on a broad level, despite imitating real world planes. Obviously some aspects of this go back to the original film, since the tie fighters just look like they're mass produced and easily destroyed. This would eventually bleed over into the video games, with a bit of hero bias, owing to how X-Wing pilots are not the faceless goons the Empire are.

In general, I actually have to wonder if this is something that was intentionally being invoked during the original movie. Lucas has stated, at least in Return of the Jedi, that the Empire was American and the Rebels were the North Vietnamese. But Lucas also invoked many WWII war films, including Triumph of the Will, a Nazi propaganda film, in the sequence in which the heroes get medals. In conclusion, it's probably a coincidence and everyone is basically doing whatever seems to be the coolest at the moment, but there's just that bit of doubt in my head that makes it seem like there's something to it.

Side note, I took the Triumph of the Will thing as gospel without checking it, but seeing that video now, it seems a lot less clear cut than I was led to believe. Sure, it shares elements, but that's just the basic setup of both.

That said, I am going to stay on this hill about how this a predecessor for the X-Wing games, and not just because it uses the same engine. The Americans focus on making sure their pilots stay alive with superior armor and offense, often to the detriment of their ability to climb. To the point that some planes have basically non-existent climbing ability. Take away the climbing aspect, sounds like the Rebel Alliance. We just don't get any A-Wings.

The Japanese focus on speed and agility, at an almost suicidal loss of armor and attack power. Who cares when you have twenty more people ready to die at the drop of a hat? Or in my case, being able to gain altitude within the century. Whoever they can't shoot down will shoot them down. Practically the doctrine of the Galactic Empire in every game I've ever played. There's just none of the fighters they give the people who prove themselves more deadly than the average fighter pilot.

Is it flak or is my plane about to crash, either way, I'm not going to be hitting that carrier.

Each mission takes place during some part of the four historical battles, except by game limitations, you either defend or attack a carrier for 90% of the game. In each mission, there are up to eight hostile planes and up to four on your side, including you. The game gets a lot out of this despite itself. That said, there are issues which become apparent as you play through the game.

The campaign feels frontloaded against the player in many respects. The Battle of the Coral Sea starts the campaign off and all the defense missions here are harder than they will be later. The Japanese campaign starts you off in a mission defending a carrier that sunk historically, which is always harder than defending one that didn't sink at that battle. I don't remember if the Japanese have more of them than the Americans, but the crucial point is that the Japanese are often put in worse situations.

Stop this plane in the middle of a dive was the other thing I seemed to never be able to do, yet I was consistently asked to do it.

This is something I became aware of as I continued through the game. Even on the in-game difficulty ratings, the Japanese get shafted. They have more impossible missions compared to the Americans, and a few of the hard missions felt that difficult. The manual talks a lot about different perspectives on the war, well, it seems that the Japanese perspective is getting killed. Was this really the best they could do? I realize I'm talking about the air force that thought that kamikaze attacks were solid military doctrine, but were there really no fights you could have put in where the Japanese have a shot at winning?

Speaking of the manual, it talks about the artistic choice to use bitmap sprites as depictions of everything from planes to ships to the bullets you fire. Like FPS games would do a few years from now. In theory, this was supposed to be part of the appeal, look at the oddball title from Lucasarts! In practice, things didn't really look any better than your average chunky model game.

Photographic proof that I have in fact, once bombed an enemy carrier. A regular Christmas miracle.

It's probably an excuse, but I found from an audio-visual perspective, the game wasn't that good. There's a reason why I prefer Amiga versions of games around this time, and the PC Speaker sounds prove why. For the most part, self-explanatory, not great but understandable. There are sound effects for planes getting destroyed, someone bailing out of a plane, and chunks of metal hitting the water. By the time I realized those later two were things I was already quite a ways through the game.

But the visuals, man, I don't get it, but I kept missing in ways I expect I wouldn't do in a game with models instead of sprites. Your shots have a distance limit, but I kept shooting too early, a problem the AI doesn't have. It also seemed like my shots went through enemy planes as opposed to hitting them, it's hard to tell. It's hard to tell if this is a problem with the method or the game itself. After all, most FPS games which use sprites don't need you to lead your shots in the slightest.

I understand a lot of what the game is trying to do, and what it's going for, but that's not necessarily fun. Now, it is reasonable in many games like this to sacrifice fun for realism, but that's not the case. Far too many aspects are sacrificing the realism for something that's neither fun nor realistic, and it just gets on my nerves.

With that, let's get to the rating.

Weapons:
It's really nice that despite there being basically two types of machine guns that there's a decent enough variation on how they're used. 3

Enemies:
Despite single-mindedness in programming, there's enough variation between the planes and ships to be a bit interesting in how you deal with them. 3

Non-Enemies:
They're like Lemmings with wings, but sometimes they do something helpful. 2

Levels:
Despite being the same sky above and featureless ground below, there's some decent variety in the number of missions. Even if by the end it's starting to become clear what the game's limitations are. 4

Player Agency:
Mostly functional, works like you'd expect, but has some issues which I feel are a bit too janky to just attribute to realism. There's also an issue where the right mouse button functions as your secondary fire...some of the time. 5

Interactivity:
None.

Atmosphere:
If the objective of the game was to make the player feel like the one sane man in a world of crazies, good job, but I think it wasn't. Could have used some islands in the distance. 2

Graphics:
I expected the spritework to be nice, but they don't seem that much better looking than the chunky models you'd see elsewhere. 2

Story:
None.

Sound/Music:
Mostly understandable, but the big standouts require a bit of time to even understand what they're supposed to be. 1

That's 22.

I don't hate Battlehawks in the end, I'm just annoyed by it. So many flaws seem less tied to something unavoidable and more just a stroke of bad luck. Just a bit more playtesting, a few more people to see how awkward it is to bomb a ship or hit enemy planes in edge cases. It would have made all the difference.

Period reviews are mostly positive, as you might expect. This noticeably feels like a step ahead of previous flight sims, even if it's a step behind Dynamix's titles. The closer to negative ones point out that it has a limited shelf life, seems like even at the time it might wear a bit thin. Oddly, I found no complaints about the pervasiveness of the game's manual copy protection, you have to look up an image every freaking time you want to play a mission.

Early on in my playthrough, I found out that the engine here was apparently reverse-engineered for use in Wing Commander. It's been a while since playing that, but I don't really remember fighting against the controls in that game as much as the controls in this game. Now of course, space and the air are two different subjects, and just because you reverse-engineered something doesn't mean you have to slavishly adhere to it. My memory of the X-Wing games also tell me that I didn't have nearly that much trouble. 

Next time, we're keeping in the '80s with the sort of FPS I skipped over, the original Mech Warrior game by Dynamix. Which I'm sure I won't be trouble at all.