Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII

Jan 12, 2007

Blazing Angels wasn't a smash success on any of the platforms it was released on in 2006, but its release on the PS3 is undoubtedly the best version of the bunch. Nevermind the added SIXAXIS motion controls, those are just garnish, because the real meat of the improvements actually enhance the gameplay of what is actually a very fun and frantic arcade shooter. So, it's no flight simulator, but Blazing Angels still manages to capture the essence of seat-of-your-pants World War II dogfighting.

Flights that are fancy

While the graphics and sound remain largely unchanged, there are several improvements in the PS3 version of Blazing Angels which demand attention. Granted, in the final version of this game, the sound has been significantly redesigned to eliminate most of the cloying clips issued by your fellow flyers. The audio cues are better spaced so that you don't get annoyed with the constant barrage of cliché cries of British, German and American pilots (it's tough to get bored of the Japanese pilots in any version, mostly because I don't speak Japanese and therefore have no idea what they're screaming about). But Ubisoft didn't stop at just retooling the audio experience of Blazing Angels, in fact, they also added some visual assistants to particularly rough levels.

A perfect example of this can be seen in the North African campaign, where you're charged with photographing some hidden Nazi bases out in the middle of a sprawling desert. On other platforms, the hunt for these secret bases became a tedious chore due to the fact that you had to attempt to follow the radio broadcasts issued from the bases. It was a tough goal to accomplish with so little guidance. However, in the PS3 version, you get two handy little bars that let you know if you're getting colder or warmer in your search. It's a small thing, but it made the level much easier to navigate and also easier to beat. The ease of escaping the North African campaign is especially nice since it is probably the least interesting of all the collections of missions. Flying over the desert just isn't as rad as flying over Hawaii or Japan, so any help getting out of there was welcome.

Best for last

One of the key issues with Blazing Angels is that the early levels are not nearly as entertaining as the later levels. Of course the first few levels serve as tutorial, so it's not hard to understand the reasoning of front-loading the game with some filler, but this could easily put gamers with a short attention span off of what is otherwise an excellent title. You start off in training in Britain, flying over churches and bombing them with toilet paper (only in jolly old England, they call them "bog rolls") and proceed to Dunkirk to assist in the fighting on the mainland once you've mastered the delicate art of TeePee-ing. These fairly standard, ho-hum levels are followed by a trip to North Africa where the sandy boredom hits you as you fly through brown, featureless dunes while hunting Rommel.

Once finished with those few levels, the real game begins and you get to fly in the Pacific campaign, where the action and the locales really show off the graphical capabilities of the PS3. From Pearl Harbor to Midway, the Pacific campaign is flawlessly gorgeous-- and extremely hectic as well. Of course, you already know you're in for a losing battle with Pearl Harbor, but that doesn't mean you just get to fly around aimlessly, there are plenty of evacuees to defend as they hightail it out of the burning port. After succeeding in, um, losing Pearl Harbor, you get to take the fight directly to the Japanese via Midway and the Georgia Islands. The best part of these missions is the stunning scenery that abounds among the jade jewels of the Pacific. The Georgia Islands positively sing with lush greenery and I found myself flying low just to skim the treetops and marvel at the sheer beauty of the land whipping beneath my plane.

And the awesome locales don't end with the Pacific campaign, because after you're finished trouncing the Japanese, it's time to return to the European theater (or theatre if you're in the RAF) in order to mop up the remainder of the still-quite-strong German forces. You begin your sweep towards Germany at (surprise, surprise) the beaches of Normandy. Now, every single WWII game in existence seems to have a Normandy level, but Blazing Angels provides one of the few interesting changes in perspective on one of the most famous historical confrontations in video game-dom. Instead of charging up the beach like the rest of the cast of Saving Private Ryan, it's up to you and your squadron to provide covering fire and much needed air support to the poor sodders below. Once you've seen your infantry brothers safely ashore, you can move north to icy Norway to chase down a good sized chunk of the German naval forces. Before you can leave the frozen wastes of the Norwegian Sea, however, you have to fly through a frosty trench that cuts its winding way through a gigantic glacier. Piloting through the frigid ice canyon was probably the most fun and frustrating thing I did in the whole game, but it made the whole experience worthwhile by changing up the gameplay a little to include some precision maneuvers as opposed to the standard dogfighting and escort duty.

Multi-national endeavor

Still, while Blazing Angels provides a fairly expansive single-player campaign, the multiplayer leaves a little to be desired. Let's face it, unless you're a hardcore plane enthusiast, flying around in circles and varying your speed, pitch and yaw so that you can get behind some other dude just isn't all that exciting in the long run. The modes offered in Blazing Angels end up feeling stifling and lack the varied gameplay of the single-player campaign. Throw in the fact that there are all of maybe fourteen people in the whole world that are playing at any given time (an issue which plagues most PS3 titles in the online arena), and it becomes impossible to eke out even one game that meets the 16-player capacity. It's unfortunate, because while two-on-two air battles may seem tedious and repetitive (because they most certainly are, I assure you), eight-on-eight might have actually been fun. Still, there's no way anyone could know, because there just aren't enough people playing the game online to find out. It's really quite a shame, because the low population of players is probably the biggest contributor to the lack of variation in Blazing Angels rather claustrophobic multiplayer.

In the final analysis, Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII succeeds in providing a decent arcade flying experience where you don't have to focus too much on specifics in order to shoot down bogeys. While it's not stellar in a few areas (specifically the multiplayer), there are a few things that it does really well, like demonstrating the awe-inspiring beauty of the Pacific Islands or bone-chilling glaciers of Norway. If you're fortunate enough to have secured a PS3 over the holiday season, Blazing Angels is probably not the first title you'll want to pick up in order to launch your collection, but it certainly should not be the last, because you could do a lot worse. It's a "must have" only if you're a huge flying fanatic or maybe if you are a WWII buff, but otherwise, you might just want to stick with renting.