Ever since Namco unleashed Ace Combat on an unsuspecting Playstation-crazed world, the console flight simulation genre has been packed to the rafters with historical, modern and futuristic takes on the Wright Brothers’ greatest invention. Not to leave out the newest format, Ubisoft have released Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII for the Xbox 360, complete with an Xbox Live powered multiplayer online dogfighting mode. Chocks away!
If you’re looking for Blazing Angels to provide a solid online experience to go with the traditional campaign mode, then you’re going to feel let down, quite frankly. You log on, choose a plane, choose a location and are thrown straight into a deathmatch-style dogfighting affair ‘ and that’s your lot. Twenty minutes of gunning the other players down, getting blown away by opponents that you can’t see and generally being bored since there are never any full 16-player games available is the order of the day here. Sure, you can join up with 7 friends and make a team, but the resulting gameplay is all but the same. If all you want is a game that can provide a quick blast of aeronautical gunplay, then you’ll be chuffed to bits old boy, but the rest of you will probably be left feeling a little flat.
Offline, the campaign mode provides a stellar challenge. Starting as one of only two Americans at your current base, you must learn to fly the bird and take out some simple stationary targets in the game’s first-mission tutorial mode, which culminates in a couple of Luftwaffe making a surprise visit ‘ and they’re just begging to be shot down. This tutorial provides a glimpse of some of the more innovative features ‘ such as the tracking camera ‘ and also shows exactly how annoying a feature can be if it isn’t implemented properly. Here, I’m talking about the bombing reticule. When a ground target needs taking out (or in the tutorial, a Church needs littering with anti-German flyers) ‘ a Mysteron-esque circular bombing target appears on the ground. Unfortunately, with no usable camera controls other than the tracking mode, it’s incredibly difficult to see where this reticule is placed at any one time. Flying down to almost ground level alleviates this somewhat, since the target at least occasionally makes an appearance when you’re down there, but if you’re dropping bombs to take out an enemy encampment and are being peppered with bullets from covering fire, you really need to be dropping your payload from up high. An overhead view option would have done the job superbly, but it wasn’t to be.
Essentially, this turns the bombing missions into a matter of luck rather than skill. In some cases, it’s much easier to take three passes at a convoy of German tanks whilst using your machine guns to take them out ‘ rather than making one pass and dropping a single bomb to do the job.
The tracking camera is a useful tool though, even if it seems unwieldy at first. Hold down the left trigger when you’re engaged in combat (air-to-air or air-to-ground, it doesn’t matter) and the camera will track the opponent for you, and you still retain full control of your ‘plane. Until you get used to it, this seems to be a little pointless ‘ as you’re now controlling the vehicle as if you were still viewing from the ‘behind and above’ camera, but you’re actually looking from a front and below or side-on view. Tricky to master, but very, very effective once you get the hang of it. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that with a little more development, this control would single-handedly remove the major problem that exists in air combat simulations. That problem being that you can hardly ever find your opponent, and that most of the time you’re just circling and circling, hoping to catch a glimpse of the blighter.
On the visual front, Blazing Angels is a deceptive one. Everything looks pretty enough to begin with, with all the rolling hills and greenery of a quiet war-time town being available to gaze at whilst you fly. Then you get to a battle above a sprawling city, and whilst things still look very sharp and believable ‘ the framerate suffers considerably. When taking out a convoy, the multiple explosions generated also play havoc with the framerate too ‘ in one case, I thought that the game was about to crash. Add this to the subtitles that appear in some bizarrely non-authentic font (’Comic Sans’ I believe) and you’re looking at a title that isn’t trying to be all that it can be.
