Battlestations Midway Unofficial Fansite
About Battlestations: Midway
Battlestations: Midway is one of the hottest release titles for the Xbox360. This game is a pretty unique mix of a strategy and action game.
Using the command map (picture 1), you can easily issue orders (moves, waypoints, attack, escort) to your units. Strategy does matter. For instance you will have to protect your base against incoming bombers and heavy ships, while trying to escort or sneak your own bombers and ships to your tagerts (enemy shipyards, airports, aircraft carriers...).
Depending on missions, you'll have control over more or less units. If controlling a few boats (1 at the beginning of the game, 2 in the demo multiplayer mission if you play 4 vs 4) or a few squadrons (3 + 1 aircraft carrier in the demo multiplayer mission if you play 4 vs 4) isn't much of a challenge, handling a whole fleet won't let you much time to take control of each unit individually.
Your units will follow your orders pretty well, but you will soon find out that it is often more efficient to take manual control over some of them (not to say most of them) and do stuff yourself. For instance when it comes to evading torpedoes or other enemy fire, human control is a big fat plus (in fact I don't even think the AI is able to do any kind of evasion).
Let's finish with some more technical details. First, the controls. You can get started right away, if your impatient like me, knowing just a few things :
- to toggle map view, use TAB
- to switch between units, use A
- to open the menu to send units (picture 2), use SHIFT
- to move your units on the map use the mouse (you can also use the mouse to select the units on the map), to cancel all moves for a unit, press space
- oh, and don't forget to at least check the objectives... the teamwork is very important, if one player is useless in a team of 4, it gives a huge disadvantage, if 2 players are useless and have the same kind of units (all ships or all planes), the game is already lost
With as little commands, you can have some fun as a complete n00b in the multiplayer game. You'll soon want to browse the commands more in details (at least to dive your submarines...) : then go to the settings and customize as you feel (I really, really hate the default WASD controls, the inverted mouse is somewhat confusing too).
The computer requirements are pretty low. I can run the game with high details on an Athlon 3500 with 2GiB RAM (no swap file) and a GeForce 6600 GT 128MiB video card, no problem at all. That's what I like with Xbox/Xbox360 games, my computer is as good as this console :)
