Strategic Mind: The Pacific

Review

Europe had been in terrible turmoil since the invasion of Poland in 1939 by Nazi Germany. The theatres of war were Europe and North Africa until the 7^th of December 1941, when the Japanese fleet of the Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto unleashed a lightning and devastating attack on the US fleet stationed on Pearl Harbour, which destroyed or damaged over 20 ships and a few hundred planes. Luckily for the US fleet, the most important vessels, the aircraft carriers, were not in the harbour at the time of the attack. The next day, the United States of America declared War on Japan and officially entered World War II. From here, it will be you who will wear the Admiral’s cap and lead your fleets to victory in Strategic Mind: The Pacific!  

Strategic Mind: The Pacific is a turn-based strategy game set in the Pacific theatre during World War II.  The game is developed and published by Starni Games and hit the Steam Store as an Early Access title on April 30, 2019.

In this current build, you’ll be taking on the role of Admiral Chester William Nimitz. There is no tutorial as such, and you’ll be jumping into a mission straight away. I must say, I consider myself to be well acquainted with this genre of game, but I must acknowledge that Strategic Mind: The Pacific is rather challenging, and I don’t think it is because of the lack of tutorial. Actually, The AI is pretty good as I can see so far.   To give you an idea, it took me a good three goes to defeat the first map without achieving all my secondary objectives, and I took serious casualties along the way. So yes, it’s tough but great fun so far.

Each mission will have primary and secondary objectives which are located on the top left corner of your screen and just under the Victory bar progress. You can open and minimise them at any given time. Upon successfully achieve a task, points will increase on your victory bar, and similarly, they will decrease if you’re unsuccessful.

Each day has two turns: Day and Night. You might have a blue sky in one turn and awful rain in the next turn, which will impact both visibility and hit points. Your fleet will have a couple of aircraft carriers, aircrafts (fighters and dive bombers), destroyers, battleships and submarines.

Submarine are the most vulnerable units in this game as I can see so far, and they can only shoot one set of torpedos per turn and receive heavy damage when hit. The battleships have two types of guns (main & secondary) and anti-aircraft batteries, while destroyers have a main gun (smaller shell than the battleship), torpedoes, anti-aircraft batteries and depth charges on board to throw into the water in case you detect enemies’ submarines. For the carriers, they have a main gun, anti-aircraft and planes (fighters and diver bombers), of course. As you destroy enemy units, you’ll be rewarded with prestige points which you can use to purchase new units, better ammo (such as fire or piercing shells for your ships) and better torpedoes for your planes, for example.  You can also have land units, but these will only be able to be placed on a battleship. The other aspect I like is the ability to choose what part of ship you want to attack with some of the dive bombers class.

After successfully winning a mission, you’ll end up in the tactical room where you can add skills to your commander (depending how many commander points you have in hand) and purchase new or upgraded units for your next battle.

In regards to the maps, you can see it from a top-down view or jump right into the middle of the action; you can use either w,a,s,d or the arrow keys on your keyboard to move around the map.

Graphically the game looks very good and I haven’t encountered too many bugs so far during my gameplay, apart from the annoying crackling sound here and there. I would have liked a tutorial, but it is on its way, along with the ability to play the Japanese side. Personally, I am looking forward to the upcoming updates. So far, so good!