It's definitely like Rogue Squadron: lots of good dogfightin' to be had here! Shooting down a Zero feels great, and the arcade feel means you never need to worry about running out of ammo. The remote will have you waving your hands in the air the way you always imagined the Wii would let you--fighter pilot Snoopy style.
Suck on that, dead arcades.
You can choose American or Japanese campaign missions, and there's a short comic book sequence to stick some story in (all the menus have this comic book look, which is nice). Unfortunately you can't go back a page, and other brief text on some background of the war is wayy to small. It's also too small everywhere else.
The first mission is Pearl Harbor of course, and it definitely captures the chaos. Where should I go? Which planes should I shoot down? How do I know when I've done enough? It drops you right into the action. The second mission has you torpedoing enemy carriers and then shooting down 'some' planes. It was pretty hard the first few times, even though the carriers weren't shooting back. I'd get locked right onto a plane, and then the Japanese would have me in their sights right away. You can't stay still for very long! Duh. You can't choose different planes for each mission yet, but that may be just for historical accuracy.
There's a health bar so you know how many more enemies to shoot down (which for some reason is fluid instead of a static 'shoot down x number of planes') and there's a health bar for each individual enemy. Your own plane doesn't have a health bar, so you have to judge by the smoke poring out and a damage warning.
The NES-style control works the best: tilting aims (which really feels like tilting.. the planes have an arcadey drift-turn to them), 2 shoots gun, 1-missile, on the dpad is Up to boost/Down to stall, Left/Right to look behind. No first person view. I don't know if it's just me, but I was constantly slipping off the boost and hitting look behind, which is really disorienting.
The nunchuk control made me want to switch back pretty fast: the nunchuck tilts to aim, the stick replaces dpad functions, and A shoots gun, Z-missile. It felt too odd to wrap my head around. Classic control is also an option.
You can't customize the buttons, but you can flip the y-axis or adjust sensitivity, and turn off enemy markers from the menu. You can also switch the nunchuk in or out at any time, and the game pauses to show you the control configuration display.
Besides campaign, there's deathmatch, survival, and free flying.
The minus button can be used to lower your landing gear, so perhaps future missions will make use of landing. I look forward to seeing what's next.
Topic: Pearl Harbor Red Sun Rising (Read 53323 times)
