I’m a bit frustrated by life right now. It’s getting kind of hard to see the other side of graduation, so I was really excited when I heard that Alawar Games had created a game that would allow me to shoot and blow things up.
You don’t really see too many of these kinds of games in the casual game market, and naturally the girls didn’t really want to try it, so I jumped at the chance to try and take out some of my frustrations on enemy ships in the game Pearl Harbor: Fire on the Water.
I’m sad to say that I was a little disappointed in this game, but maybe I had my expectations set a bit too high, since I’m used to playing your high intensity blow-em-up kind of games with Zavy. This one was more like a Navy version of Space Invaders, except the ships didn’t fight back, at least they didn’t in the first 15 levels or so that I played, and there wasn’t much skill involved to shoot the bad guys, which took a lot of the fun out of it for me.
[[pearl-harbor-01.jpg]]
The graphics are pretty cool, with the rippling water, and some of the levels even take place at night with only the light of the moon to guide your torpedoes. There are two modes of play, career mode and quick play. Career mode will take you through all 120 levels of the game, while the quick play just gets you started playing a game right away.
It’s very much a shooting gallery type of game. The ships come from both sides of the screen and go at varying speeds. You need to shoot the ships with a classic point and shoot game style that doesn’t really give you too much of a challenge. You’ve probably played these types of games before. If the ship is going too fast, then you aim a little ahead of the target. It’s not really rocket science.
[[pearl-harbor-02.jpg]]
If you’re looking for a realistic kind of game, then this really isn’t for you… while the graphics of the scenery are pretty cool looking, they go ahead and ruin it with cartoonish shaped icons you have to shoot at - like a lame umbrella in the middle of the water that you have to shoot to slow down all the ships. You even get laser guns on the ships at one point… and correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Navy had laser guns at the battle of Pearl Harbor…
And that’s another thing… while it’s not the first game to use a real life battle as the basis of the story, most games that I’ve played don’t trivialize the battle. Pearl Harbor was a real battle, one that’s very crucial in our country’s history, and where a lot of Americans died… I’m just not sure having little yellow umbrellas in the middle of the battle is an appropriate tribute, if you get what I mean.
Overall, I’m glad that Alawar has decided to venture into, forgive the pun, new waters in terms of the types of games they produce… but I’m just not sure they hit the mark with this one…
Pros: Good scenery graphics, easy game play, you get to blow stuff up.
Cons: Repetitive, not realistic, not super challenging, tends to trivialize the Battle of Pearl Harbor.
