Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, no it's…okay, it's just a plane. The flight genre has always been a tricky genre to nail perfectly. Frequent issues arise such as games being too sim, too arcadey, or the constant dogfighting wears out its welcome real quick and gets old fast. So why does Blazing Angels ultimately sputter instead of soar to new heights?

THE STORY SO FAR

Blazing Angels is set during World War II. I don't want to turn this review into an essay on the war, so there is no point for me to dictate and rehash everything you should already know from your days in school. Suffice to say, you'll dogfight during some of the war's most known battles, and yes, you'll get to pilot a plane during Pearl Harbor and see if Ubisoft can do it better than Michael Bay did.

Besides experiencing the story of World War II, you'll be playing through the story of the Blazing Angels. As the upstart pilot named, well, you aren't ever given a name to my knowledge, but you start out learning the ropes from a good ol' country boy who manages to sound like a clichéd Southern caricature even more so than Gomer Pyle in The Andy Griffith Show. After learning to fly, you'll soon be taking to the skies with wingmen on your side; the wingmen include Tom, Frank and Joe. No characterization ever happens during the game, so your wingmen will be flat, cardboard characters from beginning to end, and they don't even have their own story arc to participate in; each level is a set piece during the war and serves as nothing more than a backdrop to do more dogfighting and killing, because there isn't a single story arch (beginning, middle, or end) throughout the game.

SINGLE PLAYER: GAMEPLAY

Dogfighting is the name of the game when it comes to Blazing Angels. Besides one or two reconnaissance missions, every mission has you piloting whatever plane they give you and trying to takedown all the Germans and Japanese that you can. The process will change up a bit every so often, when instead of killing everything you see or bombing a specific target you'll be asked to protect a priority place marker or fleet of bombers in the always annoying escort missions. I don't know why developers can't get it into their head that nobody wants to do escort missions. When I lose a level I want it to be because I was bested in combat, not because a random plane got shot down that I had nothing to do with. And as for those reconnaissance missions – annoying! One recon mission in particular that infuriated me a great deal was one that required me to fly through a desert sandstorm to find German bases. So how does one go about finding German bases in a sandstorm? Why you listen to their radio chatter and head straight as long as the signal is clear or adjust your position when the conversation starts to get filled with static. It sounds simple, but it isn't, as you really have to pinpoint the exact location, and the matters get even worse when you have to listen to the same Germans chatting over and over about the same thing while they continue to do so in the most insulting German accents I've ever heard.

As for the dogfighting, the right trigger is your main weapon, the B-button selects the closest threat, the A-button selects the next objective target, the left bumper retracts your landing gears, the left and right thumbsticks fly the plane, the left trigger is used to follow the enemy or objective that is currently selected, and you use the directional pad to use your wingmen.

The dogfighing of Blazing Angels is very arcadey, which is a good thing considering the last WWII dogfighting game I played (Heroes of the Pacific) was too sim for my taste, and yet this one is too arcadey for me as well. I haven't enjoyed a dogfighting game since Crimson Skies on the Xbox, and so I guess I'll have to wait for a sequel to that franchise before I ever find a flight system that completely works for me. I did like the fact that shooting rockets, bombing objectives, and torpedoing ships was extremely easy to do in Blazing Angels, but everything else to me was give or take.

For starters, your wingmen have "special abilities" depending on if they are in your squad or not for a given mission, and these abilities range from Tom being able to taunt an enemy to follow him instead of you (can't recall ever using him), Frank going crazy with the guns and taking on multiple enemies at a time, and Joe fixing your plane by giving you directions on what to do (a timed button press minigame). The repair ability was quite nice during a lot of the game, as I could dive down into a gunfight, rise up through the clouds with my engines on fire, and then do a simple button press pattern to completely heal myself. The problem, however, comes from the fact that it makes a lot of missions way too easy, because there is typically no tension as to whether or not you'll survive an encounter or not. In other words, congrats to Ubisoft for adding the feature, but ultimately a thumbs down for terrible execution.

To succeed in this game the left trigger must be your friend, as it is the only real way to follow your enemies. However, the left trigger isn't the easiest concept to grasp, as it took me a good handful of missions to finally "get" the mechanic and learn to use it properly, but I still failed on occasion when I wasn't able to accurately judge a distance and smacked nose first into the ground. Also, for some strange reason, the left trigger will occasionally lose focus, as the camera will quickly go screwy and then disengage from its target; I could never figure out why this was so.

As I've already touched on, the game on the default setting is pretty easy, as the heal ability will automatically heal you from any damage as long as you are successful at the button presses (really easy so you should never fail). The only thing that makes the game hard are the objectives, which are unfairly out of your control so as to give the game a challenge. The only times I failed were when an uncontrollable element (such as protecting a given amount of bombers) were out of my control and I simply had to hope everything worked out for the best. Another example is one level where you have to do a preemptive attack on a ground squadron, stationed at a base, but I could never figure out what I needed to take out to be the most successful. I tried attacking the planes before they flew, I tried the planes as they were taking off, I tried taking out the base structures, and I even tried taking out the gun placements. I eventually found the right combo, but it took over 30 trial and error tries.

And while the game does have some frustrating choke points that are more tiring than exhilarating, there are a few that will keep you engaged while you attempt to perfect them. One level has you flying through this narrow canyon, shooting planes and dodging rock formations on a time limit, and though I crashed a bunch trying to swoop around the place, I was still thrilled and exited by the time I finally came out the other side with my plane completely intact.

MULTIPLAYER: GAMEPLAY

There are three different ways to play the multiplayer portion of Blazing Angels. You've got Solo mode (every player plays for themselves and tries to take everyone else out), Co-op mode (all the players have a common goal they are trying to accomplish against the AI), and Squadron (teams of up to eight players compete against each other).

Solo game modes include: Dogfight (classic deathmatch), Aces High (basically a tag mode), and Seek and Destroy (kinda a last man standing King of the Hill match). Co-op game modes include: Dogfight (kill as many planes in a given time limit), Onslaught (a battle against endless waves of enemies), Bombing Run (all planes attack an AI controlled base), Kamikaze (protect a base against kamikaze planes), and Historical Battle (play 12 of the Campaign modes together). Squadron game modes include: Dogfight (team vs. team deathmatch), Capture the Base (basically territories), Bombing Run (same as Co-op but against each other), and Kamikaze (like Co-op but against each other).

I didn't really enjoy the multiplayer all that much of Blazing Angels. Sure, if you like the single player gameplay you'll equally enjoy this (maybe even more), but as I was left unimpressed with the overall gameplay, I didn't care much about playing it against other real people. If I had to pick the Solo modes and Squadron modes are the best of the three, as Co-op felt like the normal game but without any competition whatsoever. In some games pure co-op works fine, but with a game like this you want to have some sense of accomplishment and competition when it's all over.

GRAPHICS

Given it's a 360 game, I had hopes that it would look like a 360 games, but sadly only 50% (at best!) looks like a game for a next-gen system. The planes look nice, as does the lighting, and though there are some truly spectacular moments where tons and tons of planes are on the screen, darting through the clouds and chasing after each other, other moments are uninspired messes with bland textures, unclean environments, jaggies, and other such monstrosities that shouldn't be in a game like this.

SOUND

Sound thankfully fairs better than the graphics on at least two of the three fronts, as the score is well done and cues up during the proper moments during the gameplay, though it sometimes is too overbearing and drowns out the sound (which actually isn't a negative now that I think about it), and the effects of your plane's bullets ripping planes to shreds is equally nice.

As I've made it known before, voice work usually doesn't register to high for me, as I won't dismiss a game because of it even if it isn't all that great, but Blazing Angels' voice work in insulting. I'm Southern and I've never heard anyone say anything remotely close to a phrase like "he's on me like a tick on a dog." Besides these idiotic lines, the voice is more stupid bumpkin than Southern boy; if you come down to the South nobody sounds like this, because the South only sounds like this in Hollywood since they could care less about authenticity. It isn't just the South that gets trashed in the voice work portion of the game, as both the Germans and Japanese voices are equally offensive to their respective cultures; to get a good idea of what I'm talking about think of Mickey Rooney as Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany's or for the non-cinema fans Krusty the Klown in The Simpsons when he does his "oh, me so sorry" Asian impression with squinty eyes and bucktooth rounding it all off.

CLOSING COMMENTS

You could do a lot worse than Blazing Angels and you could also do a lot better than Blazing Angels too. Blazing Angels is average…nothing more and nothing less. Gameplay isn't exciting for the most part, but yet it isn't a chore as a whole either. If you look back, everything really is right on the borderline of both the good and the bad, as it will do a few things well, but fail yet at the same time. We all know what average gets around here.

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