Aerial combat is here to stay. And I, for one, am glad to see its arrival. I mean, a first-person shooter can have all the mainstay presence it desires, but I would rather have the opportunity to be in the air, making shrapnel out of my airborne and ground-based enemies with a few sprays of bullets. That's just the thing to get some excitement going, the danger that there really isn't too much space to hide in when you're flying in the wide open in a high-speed jet or plane. But that's just my personal taste.

So you could tell I had a bit of excitement going through me when I got my hands on Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII, Ubisoft's first foray into aerial combat for the Xbox 360, following hot on the heels of their much-acclaimed GRAW. Maybe the Ghost Recon game spoiled us a little in what to expect in a military action game, as Squadrons seems a little shallow in comparison, especially in the single-player mode. But it still has its likability, especially if you throw other friends in for the ride.

As the title explains, you're a pilot in World War II, and you find yourself teamed up with a ragtag squadron of fellow fighters who fly on a series of missions to help regain crucial land and give a hand to those allies that need a little help. Now, the single player parts of the game should live up to some promise and really involve you, right? Well, sadly, they never do. The training missions, while trying to be helpful, also get a bit tedious, and then once you get to the range of missions that are at hand, you'll find that most of them are the same, even though the locales change from Dunkirk to Pearl Harbor.

Part of the tedium of these missions is some pretty lackluster AI. For instance, where some dogfights should be downright exhilirating, they instead come off as quick affairs where you can quickly sneak up behind a plane or ground target and lay waste before they even have any idea what's going on. To further insult us, Ubisoft hired up some voice actors to try and get some foreign dialogue to get us fired up to take them down, and they sound cornball...and maybe even a bit offensive.

And that's too bad, because the game handles just fine. True, it doesn't have all the complicated controls of something like Heroes of the Pacific back on Xbox, but the precision of targeting and even being able to track your targets not in your plain view (a trick taken from Secret Weapons Over Normandy, perhaps?) are great. Some might be bothered by the lack of controlling stuff like a yaw and such, but arcade players will be delighted by the ease of controls. The ease of enemies, however, is another matter. Fortunately, the story mode can be skipped in favor of a duel ace mode, or an arcade mode, where swarms of enemies continue to come at you, After Burner-style. So those looking for quickie action will get it by the bushel.

The graphics look superb. While there are some moments of fuzziness throughout, the frame rate remains relatively smooth and the detail in each of the areas, from war-torn France to a bullet-ridden Pearl Harbor, are fantastic. The planes also look fantastic, complete with custom paint jobs that you can unlock depending on the missions you finish up. Storming over the Midway has never been so insane in terms of visual disruption. The sound, on the other hand, needs a little work. The music is just fine, true to the theme at hand, but then comes that voice acting again, and...ugh. It's like something out of a Three Stooges short.

Where Blazing Angels manages to stay the course is in its mulitplayer. Four players can jump in in a series of co-op levels similar to the ones in the campaign, and here the difficulty picks up a little as your reliance on your squad members is no longer handled by the inept AI, but by real people. This is good to play around with. But the real essence lies in versus combat, where up to sixteen people can take part in the dogfight through a series of modes, like capture the base, bombing run, and seek and destroy and kamikaze missions. All of these are smooth over the multiplayer circuit, and help pick up the game's energy tremendously.

So, oddly enough, Blazing Angels suffers the same fate as the previously reviewed war game, The Outfit. Presentation could've been touched up, and the single-player mode loses interest quickly. But in multiplayer, it's got the weight of gold all its own. Like THQ's game, Angels will draw in its own specific crowd of gamers (the arcade crowd, probably) who will want to rent first, and then decide if they want to take the plunge. Just be aware- you won't be getting the impact of a carrier airwing like you want, but it ain't no tour plane neither.

Our Final ScoreOK

What did you think of this game? Post Your Own Review