Try it (LITE) and then buy it – Pacific Fleet Review

I'm giving this game 5* for what it is, though there are some frustrating aspects I'll detail in a bit. PROS: - Casual, fun, blowing up ships and watching them sink is very satisfying. Provides just enough variety and requires just enough thought to keep it from being boring while remaining something you can visit whenever you have spare time and still have fun with, without having to invest too much brain power or time. - Play as submarines, destroyers, cruisers/battleships, or carriers, each of which plays quite differently (cruisers and battleships are very similar, so I lump them together). CONS: - Subs are very dependent on starting location, because they are slow as heck. Get placed behind an enemy group and you may as well restart, because you will never catch them, they'll just slowly pull away. This is realistic (speed really is a submarine’s weakness), but not fun. - Torpedoes are maddening on the U.S. side until you buy the two upgrades (then they are fine). - Similarly, without buying the RADAR upgrade, firing on enemies is just a guessing game. No amount of "player skill" is ever going to let you judge the gun elevation correctly, especially since each ship's gun is different. Again, though, this does not require real money (nothing in the game does) and is rapidly acquired after only a few missions. - Carriers are useless at night and too squishy regardless: one hit and they become floating targets since they can't launch aircraft while their flight deck is on fire. - Island levels are rather frustrating. It’s difficult to target the little things on the beach you are supposed to hit, and radar can’t help you. This is again, realistic – radar can’t spot some building on an island from a mile out to sea – but again not fun. It seems like the developers thought sea battles would get monotonous so they wanted to try something to break them up. Nice idea, but the island levels were not the right answer. I powered through them, and actually got better at using my dive bombers because of them, but I always groaned when I saw I had to endure one to progress through the game. PACIFIC vs ATLANTIC: - IN GENERAL: Pacific is by far the more casual of the two, though neither really reaches "sim" level. - BIG DIFFERENCE: In Pacific, torpedos last one turn. You fire them directly at static enemy ships. In Atlantic, torpedoes take two or three turns, so when you fire them, you have to "guesstimate" how far they will go each turn and where the enemy target will be when they finally reach it. Subs in either game are already borderline useless unless they are placed optimally to attack an enemy ship (because they are slow and their torpedoes are inaccurate and short-ranged), but in Atlantic the extra variables make submarines an extreme challenge to use offensively, to the point of frequently being frustrating. - BIG DIFFERENCE: No island battles in Atlantic (at least not 18 battles into the campaign) which is good because island battles are universally hated. - BIG DIFFERENCE: The radar is uncannily accurate in Pacific, making the game much more casual (while shell drift keeps it from being too ridiculously easy). In Atlantic, the radar is so inaccurate, it's really a mere suggestion, which can be maddening. - Pacific requires you to spend "renown" (the in-game currency, which is fortunately not something that you can buy with real money... this is not a F2P money sucker) to upgrade your ships; Atlantic sells you the ships fully upgraded. - In Atlantic you have to spend renown to replace your lost ships; in Pacific, you don't. This makes losing ships more of a penalty in Atlantic. - You can withdraw from battles in Atlantic without having to SCUTTLE your ships (and therefore wipe out all their crew experience). Which is better? That's a matter of opinion. I like and play both a lot, but they are quite different. Try the free versions of each, and if one or both entertain you, buy the full versions. They provide a lot more gameplay and I find I play them several times a day when I have downtime, so well worth the money.
Review by FleshyHeadedMonkey on Pacific Fleet.