Heroes of the Pacific is a WW2 action flightsim, that lets you experience key battles, such as the attack on Pearl Harbour or the Battle of Midway. You can choose over fifteen aircraft to shoot the Japanese naval air force to kingdom come. At least, that's the concept of the game.

In practice, things turned out quite differently. The installation of the game went flawlessly and so did the finetuning of the games' options, but when I actually started the game, the proverbial shit hit the fan.

I started the first mission, but only half of the world was rendered. Clearly a driver problem, so I thought. Since I already had the latest Catalyst drivers for my Radeon X850XT PE video card (5.11), I tried some of the earlier releases (5.9 and 5.5), but that didn't help either. Checking the troubleshooting part of the readme also couldn't solve my problem, as did visiting the official discussion boards.

But the graphical glitches weren't the only problems. Everytime I started a session (taking the graphical bugs for granted), the game froze after about 2 minutes (total lock-up) of game time. A hard reboot of my PC proved to be the only solution. Ok, this can still be due to incompatibility with my hardware, but if this was the case, I would have preferred to see this mentioned in the manual. For the record: HotP is the only game I've played thusfar that can't run properly on my system.

And that still wasn't the end. Even though my joystick (Microsoft SideWinder Precision Pro) was detected and could be calibrated in the menus, it couldn't be used ingame. I had to resort to using the keyboard instead (at least until it froze again). I once again checked the discussion boards and quickly noticed that I certainly wasn't the only one with this problem. That's why it's such a disgrace that Codemasters still hasn't released a patch to date to solve these obvious flaws. It goes without saying that this is an example of very poor support. It also explains why this review is a month over due: I waited for a patch to come out.