PTO 4 for PlayStation 2 Reviews by Gamers

First off you've got to love Koei and their propensity for coming up with some off beat titles. Unfortunately they also have a tendency of making titles that are a bit more complex than they need to be. In the case of PTO4 getting down to all the gritty details of ship design, research allocation, moving fleets around and then actually conducting battles can quickly overwhelm all but the most ardent gamer.

Fortunately in the case of PTO4 a lot of this can be "delegated" to the game itself, which essentially means it all runs on auto pilot and you don't have to worry about the details. Later, as you become more familiar with the game, you can start taking over some of these actions yourself if you think you can do better. Unfortunately the one area where you would like more control (the moving of ships and targeting the enemy during battle) doesn't seem to be available. So all you can do is tell your fleet to target another fleet and then they have at it. In the end this means all the battles are just a numbers game. If you have more ships/planes in your fleet going into the battle you're going to win. There isn't enough fine tune in the controls during the battle to really change the outcome (of course if there was that would potentially make the game completely unplayable, so it's kind of a double edge sword). So as mentioned on the one hand there's too much going on but there's still not enough control to really make a difference.

The other thing that needs to be said is while the graphics were ok, realizing it's a PS2 game, the fact that all the battles seem to take place in some sort of fog is really distracting. I don't know if that was an attempt at a "fog of war" thing or to cover poor graphics on the ships themselves or what, but most of the time you can barely make out what's going on during the battles.

So if you like war games you may like this. I think there's enough problems with it to keep it from being enjoyable to the casual gamer.

I'm big into the WWII category and I figured this game would be cool. I mean, it's original right. But cool things have a habit of sinking...and fast. There is no strategy element in the combat, just overpower your enemy's fleet. The controls are slapped-on and gimmicky, and the graphics suck. Do yourself a favor, don't rent or buy this game.