Pacific Wings

Genre: Shmup

Players: 1

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Review:

Pacific Wings is a Shmup designed to look and play like an old-school WWII shmup – specifically, this game very clearly had games like Capcom’s 1942 in its crosshairs when it came to the look and feel of the game. However, even though Pacific Wings looks like the sort of game you would expect to be from 1980s arcades, this game was actually first released to mobile platforms in 2010.

Visually, this game does a great job of imitating those classic games, even offering an optional screen filter to imitate old CRT screens. The sound and music, on the other hand, is a bit less successful, with underwhelming gun and explosion effects and repetitive music.

The gameplay itself is mostly decent, with a good variety of enemies and situations, with both ground and air targets, as well as a power-up system that has your power downgrading when you get hit, making power-ups double as an extra set of armor.

While for the most part this is a solid, albeit simplistic, shmup that does exactly what it sets out to do, there are a few frustrations here. Most notably, there is no auto-fire in this game, meaning that each bullet you fire requires a separate tap on a button. This can get extremely tiresome, and is an odd omission. Also, this game seems like it would have been ideal for multiplayer play, but there’s no such option present.

In the end, Pacific Wings is a decent attempt to try to capture the nostalgia of old-school shmups, although the lack of auto-fire, absence of multiplayer, and underwhelming sound makes this a game you’re not likely to come back to or even remember all that well after playing it.

tl;dr – Pacific Wings is a Shmup that imitates classic games in the genre like 1942. This game does a great job capturing that nostalgia, but the lack of auto-fire makes this game tedious to play, and the underwhelming sound and lack of multiplayer limit how long you’ll bother to stick with the game.

Grade: C

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