Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII can be somewhat deceiving by simply taking a look at a gameplay movie or screenshot. The game design is very oddly split between completely realistic and very arcade-like, unrealistic elements of the game. The planes, their camouflage and most of the battles are all true and valid to their real-life counterparts; but, some of the presentations and mechanics of the game are quite unrealistic.
Ubisoft included every single campaign American pilots participated in; but all witnessed by the same soldier which is highly unlikely. Your first mission starts out in London where you witness the Battle of Britain, one the largest battles of the sky in WWII. From there you go onto other campaigns fighting Germans in Europe and Africa, and the Japanese Imperial Army in the Pacific.
Your character is a captain in a squad of 4; he doesn’t actually have a voice and it really starts to become a nuisance once you start issuing your squad orders and you see subtitles to what you’re saying, but nothing is heard. Your squad mates fly 3 planes that are always flying beside you and each plane has way of benefiting your character’s aircraft. The game tries to build character for each one of your squad mates, but you never really feel attached to them, especially since they are invincible. Overall though, the squad system works well in the game and makes it easier for you to clear the sky filled with enemy planes.
Blazing Angels does a great job with the dog fighting mechanics of the game; the planes all handle realistically; where smaller planes fly and turn faster and bigger bombers are more sluggish and harder to chase enemies with. Based on the mission, your plane can either be a fighter, a bomber, or a torpedo bomber. In one mission you even have to land your fighter and get into a bomber to take out a couple of enemy ships. Your plane’s load-out caters more to the arcade feel with unlimited ammo and rechargeable bombs, torpedoes and missiles; whether that bothers you or not is merely a personal preference.
The enemy AI is pretty well done too, they can give you a fairly good challenge by outmaneuvering you. The one thing that was missing is the enemies never attack as a group, they enter the battle together but break apart as soon as they spot you; therefore, you’re always only fighting one plane at a time.
The major negative side to the gameplay is that your tasks are constantly recycled. There are almost 20 missions in this game and all of them revolve around bombing ships, vehicles, or buildings, and fighting enemy aircraft. At first I didn’t notice this as much, considering that every mission introduces a brand new locale, but after a while you get jaded on doing the same tasks over and over. After each mission you are ranked and given a rating based on how quick you finished the tasks. The more stars you get, the more planes you unlock for your garage, which you can later use in online play.
The controls are about average in Blazing Angels. The right stick controls the speed of the plane by leaning it forward and pulling it back to slow down; you also start your plane by rotating the stick like a propeller. The left stick controls your plane’s movements and the d-pad gives the squad commands. You also have control over your landing gear by hitting the left bumper and the right bumper to select your primary weapon.
The neat addition to Blazing Angels is the chase cam which is enabled by holding the left trigger. When you hold it down, you will see your selected target and this helps you follow it easier and more efficiently – a great and much needed feature to get rid of some frustration linked to dog fighting in video games.
Although Blazing Angels is an Xbox 360 game, it still doesn’t look quite next-gen. There are some decent lighting effects in game and the textures looks sharp for the most part, but it still lacks that “wow” effect some of the other games have had. The game does an impressive job with city missions like London and Paris, where miles of buildings are Ubisoft also did an amazing job with the skies, which a lot of times are full of character and it feels like you’re in a WWII painting.
The game unfortunately doesn’t look that great if you get near anything close to the ground; the soldiers, the tanks, the APCs, they all look blurry, boxy, and just terrible overall. At the same time the game looks jaggier than I’d like it to, the planes especially at times look to be in some serious need of anti-aliasing.
