How easy it is to command squadrons sometimes depends on the difficulty setting you're playing. In a Regular mode level, I was able to leave a squadron of planes unsupervised to fend off enemy bomb attacks on one of my naval bases without having to constantly check in on their progress. The squadron, with little instruction from me, was able to handle the attacks. Granted, the squadron lost a lot of lives, but they successfully fended off enemy bombers. However, I went back and played the same level in Veteran mode. In Veteran mode, I had to take a much more active role in commanding my plane squadron, as the enemy bomber planes seemed more intelligent and more maneuverable than they were in Regular mode.

Not only is it hard to keep track of your forces, it's also hard to maneuver game vehicles. I often got really frustrated trying to make battleships and aircraft carriers turn. Battleships can only fire at enemy ships when parallel to them, and parallelism takes a lot more effort to achieve than it should. To me, most game vehicles seem to move very slowly. As battles are constantly happening in game missions, it's desirable to have vehicles move fast to get to attack points. All too often, I felt like I was watching a pot try to boil while attempting to get a vehicle from location to the next. The only thing that boiled over was my patience.

The universal WASD control scheme makes controlling game vehicles, from submarines, to fighter planes, to bombers not unique experiences. For example, I noticed very little difference between Japanese and American vehicles. Pacific fails to achieve the realism of having different fighters/ships control differently.

Graphically, the game seems less advanced than current combat games out there. Game objects, like planes, aircraft carriers, etc. seemed more animated than realistic. I felt like I was watching a Pixar animation at points rather than engaging in a combat simulation. I played the game on an i7 iMac and environmental details never seemed crisp or bright. The game takes place in the Pacific Ocean, an area known for such beautiful locations like Hawaii and Samoa, but the game's lighting doesn't do its settings justice. The game's lighting felt like was meant to light East Germany, not Pacific Ocean environments. Still, there are details in the game that are really well rendered. Water, for example, looks very realistic in the game.

I was once an ardent player of The Sims. I loved that game because I was able to take full control of every detail of my sim's life. In many ways, The Sims and Battlestations: Pacific are alike. You have an almost God-like control of your gameplay in both. The Sims however, is a slow game, not a lot happens in it unless you make it happen. Battlestations: Pacific is a war game, which means that by definition, it's fast, making omnipresence harder to accomplish. In fact, Pacific makes you shift your focus way too often. One minute, you're controlling a battleship, the next you're a fighter pilot, the next you're a submarine captain. In levels, when you're trying to accomplish one task as commander of a single craft, you still have to keep track of every other force under your command. Because you're attention can easily get divided in the game, it is hard to get bored, but at the same point its hard to enjoy one aspect of combat because you'll have to switch to another aspect quickly.