Page 2
First, I am going to be very upfront with you guys. MOH:PA, while being a pretty good game still, is not as good as MOH:AA. Progression through the game is very linear (save a few rare instances where you can make multiple decisions), the scenery is rather monotonous, and most of the game is plagued with rather boring situations and fire fights. Mind you, the game had its intense and awesomely fun parts, but there were just too many dull points of the game to have fun all the time. You will spend most of your time running around the jungle (well of course, given your geographical location), but they could have made the levels more varied than just "a few screens of jungle, then an outpost. Kill the people in the outpost, and you have completed your goal".
That was the biggest problem with the game, the monotony of the levels, and if anyone has played a game where this is true (cough... Halo 1), its a big downer on the game experience. That doesn't mean however, that this game is a poor game, its still challenging and entertaining. What the developers of Pacific Assault have done really well in this game is capture the feelings of the soldiers amidst all this combat. You really connect with your buddies in the game, and you really try to prevent their deaths. Pacific Assault for sure brought out the more dramatic feelings during war, an almost movie type of game experience. This being said, Pacific Assault had a lot more to it than plain gun fights and bloody deaths, it had the emotion that is carried along with all of that. That being said, let's get down to gameplay specifics.
Combat and Team A.I.
If any of you played the demo of MOH:PA, let me say right off the bat, that the retail game is much, much more difficult. In the demo there were 20 or so Japanese soldiers running at you, and they were as easy to kill as ants. However in this game, if one or two enemy soldiers start firing at you from a distance and hit you, you are going to take some damage. If they decide to run at you and start whacking you with their rifles, you are going to take some damage. And by some, I mean a lot. Needless to say this game does have a realistic feel in its fights, because you end up dead quickly. This makes the game frustrating sometimes, but hey, its war. Something I love about this game is when you are shot dead, you have the opportunity to start yelling for a medic, and if your medic is alive and gets to you before you either A. bleed to death or B. get a boot in your face from an enemy soldier, he will sprinkle "magical dust" on you that will return you to life. Sometimes he even pukes in disgust before he heals you. Nice. Right when you get up your vision is still a little blurry, which looks rather cool, and it takes a few seconds to be back to normal. This may not be a new concept to some of you, but its a fun game play aspect to experience.
Your weapons range from the outright pathetic weapon that you start with, to nice home or foreign made automatic machine guns and even mounted automatic guns that can take down planes. The latter of the weapons is very fun to shoot off. After awhile the vibrations get to your character and your vision starts to blur, making aiming very difficult. This is another example of some well placed realism into the game. How are the other weapons you ask? Well it should please most of you that you have iron sights, something that every first person shooter should have, but something that war games must absolutely have. If you are not familiar with what iron sights are, I'll be obliged to explain. When you aim with a gun in this game, you use the actual sights on that make and model of the gun. So for every different gun there is a different looking way of aiming it and taking out your targets.
An example of iron sights.
