There's often a choice of missions to fly, which sounds like a good thing, but in a game this short, preventing the player from experiencing about half the possible missions just doesn't make sense. Of course, you can always replay the campaign to see what you missed, but chances are you're just not going to want to do that. And while you can't permanently die, it's possible to actually fail the campaign if you lose all of your aircraft, but since you can fly a damaged plane out of the combat area to repair it and reset the current mission, and since you earn spare aircraft as your kills mount up, you'd have to kiss an awful lot of mountainsides for this to be an issue.
It's fortunate that you don't need to pass any particular mission to advance the campaign, and that it doesn't take a lot of effort to build up a large stable of spare aircraft, because while Attack on Pearl Harbor might be a simple game, even at the normal difficulty setting, it is far from an easy one. Unless you're quite adept at action games, expect your ass to get handed to you fairly regularly. The AI pilots are competent flyers and decent shots and can hound you mercilessly, and they're frequently present in overwhelming numbers. It's hard enough when you're on the short end of 10 to 1 odds, but it's downright murderous when you're that outnumbered and also need to take out a specific target within a time limit, or are required to protect an ally that'll be quickly obliterated unless you're very fast and very good. Fortunately, there's also an easy setting, and while it's not a complete cakewalk, it's close.
Who knows if Attack on Pearl Harbor started life as a serious flight sim but ended up taking a sharp detour, or if it was always supposed to be an unrealistic action title that illogically was given a real-life setting. Either way, the mix doesn't really work, and it would have been better off if it had stuck with one route or the other, either upping the complexity and becoming a full-blown sim, or better yet, abandoning the World War II theme and ditching the planes that are supposedly based on actual aircraft but obviously perform nothing like their real-life counterparts. If the game was based in a fictional universe, if the missions were far more intriguing (and there were far more of them), if you could acquire a variety of interesting, customizable aircraft, and it was all wrapped up in a half-way decent story...well, then, it couldn't have been called Attack on Pearl Harbor, but it likely would have been much more enjoyable and involving experience, something along the lines of a poor man's Crimson Skies. As it is, it's too simple, too short, and becomes boring far too quickly to recommend.
