1943: The Battle of Midway

1943 is Capcom's sequel to 1942 and it drops the slow, distant framing of the first game for a much faster vertical shooter with a genuinely long campaign. You fly a P-38 Lightning through sixteen stages of the Pacific campaign, from Midway to the Japanese home islands.

The defining mechanic is the energy meter. Instead of a fixed number of lives, your plane has a health bar, and the same bar pays for special weapons - so every time you use a screen-clearing bomb you are spending survivability. The roll move (holding B) makes you briefly invulnerable and is the game's answer to incoming fire, and between stages you choose your next route from a map, giving the campaign a light branching structure. The two-player mode puts both planes on the same screen against the same waves.

• ▸Shared energy meter that doubles as health and special-weapon fuel
• ▸Roll move with brief invulnerability as the main defensive option
• ▸Sixteen-stage Pacific campaign with a map-based route choice
• ▸Two-player simultaneous co-op