Battlestations: Midway

Battlestations: Midway is an unusual mix of strategy and action in which the player commands an entire fleet during the Battle of Midway and other naval engagements in the Pacific during World War II, while being able to switch at any time from a top-down tactical map view to directly controlling an individual warship, submarine, or fighter plane and personally opening fire on the enemy. The campaign follows the course of the war from the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor to the key turning points in the Pacific. The game was made primarily for Xbox 360, where it launched in early 2007, and only reached PC several months later, in the fall of the same year.

The Xbox 360 version is thus the original form of the game, one for which gamepad controls were designed from the very start of development — switching between the tactical map view, commanding the whole fleet, and directly controlling individual units works through simple shortcuts on the sticks and buttons, an unusual but functional way at the time to handle such varied gameplay situations without a keyboard and mouse at hand. The graphics were tuned for the TVs and console resolution of the day, while the later PC version offered sharper ship and aircraft textures, a longer draw distance for the open sea, and support for higher monitor resolutions, including widescreen formats.

Content-wise, the two versions are essentially identical — the same missions, ships, and planes, the same story and campaign progression — but it was the Xbox 360 release that the public and reviewers saw first, and the later mouse-and-keyboard controls on PC were only derived from it afterward. For players who prefer a gamepad, the original console version therefore remains the more natural choice, partly because the controls were designed for it first and only later adapted for PC, rather than the other way around, as was typical for similar titles. Reviewers at the time praised how the developers at Eidos Hungary managed to handle the fairly complex switching between dozens of vessels without having to drastically simplify the controls, something that similarly ambitious console titles from the mid-2000s didn't always pull off.

Why play it: For players who prefer a gamepad, the console version is the more natural choice, since the controls were designed for it first and only later adapted for PC.