Mixing genres in games is tough business. When done right, you'll end up with something revolutionary like Grand Theft Auto or Total War. More often than not such genre-bending produces a game like Battlestations: Pacific--a title whose accessible mix of strategy and action ends up simplifying both elements to a level where nothing in either mechanic stands out. But what the game misses in depth, it makes up in volume. You'll have many dozens of land, sea, and air units at your command by the end of the 15 or so hours it'll take to complete the campaign. When you factor in some questionable story elements and several grind-away missions, however, the game gets tedious well before it's over.
Battlestations is ambitious about the sheer number of units you'll eventually gain access to. While the first few battles will involve a single unit or squadron, you'll eventually gain the ability to command an entire carrier group or island strongpoint. You'll flip between battleships, cruisers, patrol-boats, submarines, and troop carriers. And that's just your navy. You'll also have full control over a seemingly limitless variety of attack planes and bombers. The good news is that they're all easy to switch in and out of during even the most hectic battles. The bad news is that each class of unit--be it ship, plane, or submarine--plays almost exactly the same. The only difference you'll notice between each is the number of guns, bombs, or torpedos you carry and that unit's overall health and speed. It's very much like grabbing a new car in Grand Theft Auto. You'll instantly know what to do with whatever you happen to have and at the same time not care too much about what you picked up. While that will suffice for some, if you're going into Battlestations looking for Ace Combat or Silent Hunter-style controls, you will very quickly be disappointed.
Battlestations provides a skirmish mode as well as some objective-based multiplayer game types that vary from single-unit deathmatches to full 4v4 island-capture campaigns. The latter are especially fun and while your experience will definitely vary depending upon your team's composition, you can definitely see the more casual strategy elements of the campaign disappear in the face of human opposition. Deciding whether to spread out your navy or keep them tightly packed presents equally viable strategies, and the replayability in these team modes seem pretty deep. With human opponents you'll also notice that aiming for rival ships' individual systems becomes a bit more important, and equal sided confrontations usually are won by whoever can exploit that aiming mechanism. Unfortunately, finding other players seems a little tough, and I'd often sit in waiting rooms for five minutes just to see someone pop in and then quickly pop out.
The one place where the audio suffers though is in the game's voice acting. Unfortunately Battlestations' attempts at providing context to the history through short cutscenes during checkpoints and between missions fail miserably. These snippets usually involve gruff caricatures of what a little kid assumes an admiral should sound like. The game's missions carry themselves on their own and bookending such ridiculousness as a scripted butterfly landing on a samurai sword might wear on you. Thankfully, all the cheese is skippable.
In the end, Battlestations: Pacific is a game you'll likely want to demo before you commit to a purchase. While some will definitely enjoy the sandbox nature of the game and the variety of units it provides, others might be put off by the arcadey gameplay and simplistic strategy. The game provides a decent amount of replayability through its multiplayer modes but it's hard to tell if there are enough gamers online as of this writing to make that a sure thing. Also important to note is that I found that the game plays best with a 360 controller even on the PC version, as switching between a mouse and joystick to get the same control setup can make for a crowded desk. The PC version is Games for Windows Live compatible, so all you achievement-philes should be OK picking either version.
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