I'm sorry. I spoke too soon when I awarded this game a 2/10. See, I hadn't seen the “Fly Boys” sequence yet. The “Fly Boys” sequence is truly the fucking pinnacle of this series. Let me set the scene... You're a Marine jungle fighter, being transited to a new post. Naturally, you're put in the gunner's position of a Dauntless dive bomber for the flight. Standard practice during WWII, really, ferry footsoldiers around in combat aircraft. Sure. So, needless to say, your flight of four Dauntlesses is ambushed by about a dozen Zeros, and even more needless to say, they're all shot down by the wisecracking tailgunners. But wait! The pilot of your Dauntless is hit, and “gets blood in his eyes,” causing him to bail out. So you climb out of the gunner's position, over the canopy, into the fucking cockpit, all while in flight, and commence with the most hideously unplayable experience in the history of gaming.
I guess the designers figured that they'd pushed the whole “world tour of turrets” to the limit, and wanted to find some other way to make their FPS not be an FPS. So, now it's a flight sim. And not just any flight sim. The worst flight sim ever made. The mouse controls are insane, the flight physics indecipherable, the enemy aircraft capable of maneuvers that defy logic. No gun sight to aim with, no feedback when you hit. You just clumsily fumble about, spraying tracers at fleeting Zeros, nary a clue as to what to do. As surprised as anyone when you shoot something down.
Then you come upon a carrier and a destroyer. This is really the zenith of the developer's art. Previously the gameplay had just been irritating and unrewarding. At this point, it simply goes insane. You have four bombs and a torpedo. You have to destroy the carrier and the destroyer. It's borderline impossible to miss with your ordnance, but no matter what you do, no matter how much burny animation appears on the ships, they don't sink. You just fly around, shooting randomly at crap, trying to figure out what to do, and then at some point, I'd guess it's on a timer, you just start eating shit and explode in the air. Same thing every time. Shoot down lots of Zeros? Same thing. Drop four bombs on the bridge of the carrier, as your idiot flying buddies suggest? Nothing happens, same outcome. Apparently the carrier gunners figure out how to use their guns at that point, I don't know. Nothing in this game makes sense or can be learned from. You just clumsily fly around for about a minute and a half, and suddenly you get mauled out of the sky. Over, and over, and over and over. No hint is given as to what you need to do, what you should change about your approach. You just die.
This is the world the programmers have created. It's a world where insane shit, like a footsoldier flying a Dauntless in combat, happens all the time, so you have no basis to judge what's going on. In a flight sim, you might say “am I flying too slow and the guns are getting me?” You might look at common tactics from the era to try to refine your technique. There's no such logic here. It's a combination of fantastic bullshit, and harsh reality, only the worst parts of both, with a horribly clumsy flying interface over the top of it. I wish everyone in the world could see the INSANE pulsing bolts in the cockpit of the plane. They just flicker and change size and leap about like the testers never even looked at the fucking game before they shipped it. It's just a hideous graphical error, and it happens the whole time you're trying to trudge your way through the most retarded fucking thing ever put into an FPS.
It's been a long time since I was forced to actually destroy a CD/DVD. This game earned that high honor. When a game is so bad that I will gladly destroy the media it came on, when I could probably resell it for $25 or whatever, that's one hell of a terrible fucking game. I know that the designers of this game don't read my blog. In fact, I doubt anybody who reads this blog has ever even played the game. But let me be clear: If you enjoyed this game, or better yet, are responsible for it, I want to fight you. To the death.
This may be the worst game I've ever played. It's certainly the worst that I can recall. EA, stop making these games, stop monopolizing the WWII genre. You make nothing but awful shit, you're the worst software company ever. I hope all of you get dick cancer, and it spreads to your brains.