PLATFORM

Xbox 360, Xbox, Playstation 3, Nintendo Wii, PC

DEVELOPER

Ubisoft Romania

PUBLISHER

Ubisoft

GENRE

Flight Combat

# OF PLAYERS

1, Multiplayer online

Rating

T

U.S. RELEASE DATE

March 20th - Nintendo Wii March 23rd, 2007 - XBox 360 March 28th - PC December 12th 2006 - PS3

MSRP

$39.99

Blazing Angels: Squadrons of World War II

OVERVIEW

Battle your way through the famous engagements of World War II.

REVIEW

I am always game for a good air combat game - always have been, since way back in the old F-15 Strike Eagle days. It is one genre that legitimately seems to get better and better each generation. Heck - Ace Combat is one of a very few games that kept me buying Playstation.

Naturally with a brand new Wii, I was looking for a solid air combat game for the system. This was really lacking in the Gamecube, and I am still hoping that the Wii will be a little more-well rounded, so I decided to pick this one up with high hopes. I read some average reviews, but I didn’t really let that bother me. I wasn’t expecting the game to blow me away - I just wanted a nice fun shooter and all.

As the title suggests, this is a World War II Era game. You play a member of an American fighter squad who enlisted with the Royal Air Force to fight the Germans prior to the US’s entry into the war. The game starts at the Battle of Britain, works its way through Africa, Pearl Harbor, and Midway before it goes through D-Day, France, and finally Berlin. In each mission you have access to various planes, and as the game progresses, you unlock more aircraft that are supposed to be more mission specific.

The first and most important thing I looked for was the way the game handled the Wii controller. Of all the different game genres out there, the Flight games were the only ones where I honestly had no idea how they would translate to the new controller. Seems like I wasn’t alone there - Blazing Angels had no idea either, so they tried a whole bunch. One control scheme seemed to be more traditional (thumbstick for turning, buttons for various functions), another attempted to use the nunchuck itself as a flight-stick, while the third didn’t use the nunchuck at all, instead opting for the sideways Wii Remote with the tilt sensors acting as the flight controls.

Frankly, the use of the motion controls was terrible. The motion controls simply aren’t precise or reliable enough to work that way (a steering wheel seems to be about as complex as you can get with it), and both schemes that utilized the motion controls for movement were ultimately flawed.

The Classic scheme seemed to work best, but there was just too much you needed to press buttons for. Whenever you have so much functionality in a controller that you need to assign a “shift” button, you know you need to simplify things. You have your various weapon and directional controls, and you have to control the actions of your various squad-mates. You also had two buttons dedicated to camera control, including the main A button (on Classic) devoted to the equally frustrating and awesome follow enemy camera.

See, if you press the A button, the camera will follow whatever you have targeted. This takes a little getting used to, but it becomes awesome. It allows you to keep constant track of your prey, and once you learn to ease in and out of it, and can maneuver without crashing into the ground, it really helps you in dogfights.

Trouble is that it uses the A button in classic mode. Now you use the directional pad to throttle up and down. Now the game recommends that you hit the A button and throttle down for the tightest of all turns. Now it is possible to press both the A Button and down on the directional pad at the same time, but it is difficult, and lead to my first case of gamer’s thumb on the Wii. If you want to speed up while following the enemy? Well, you can forget it, because it is impossible. You can also count out any assistance from your wingmen, because so long as you are following your target, it is just physically impossible to execute any commands.

Which brings me to the wingmen. Exactly when did it become standard practice in air combat games to have wingmen to control? Who’s terrible idea was this? I mean, when it was simple, I liked it fine. I usually just sent them away or had them perform some distracting task just so that they would stay out of my way. Blazing Angels takes this to a whole new level. One wingman helps you repair damage in flight - a useful tool, really. And it is presented well - when you call on him, he gives you a button combination to press, and explains what it will “do.” All of the repair explanations sound fairly reasonable - so it doesn’t seem like your damage is just magically vanishing, but in reality it is, giving you little incentive to avoid getting hit in the first place. As a result you can dive-bomb your targets with reckless abandon, only to flee and recover all of your health like nothing happened.

The other two wingmen are a total waste. One “shields” you by taking some damage meant for you, and another will “hunt” an assigned target for you. What is wrong with just ordering your wingmen to form up or go engage the enemy? The whole wingmen angle adds a needlessly complicated and way over-sophisticated aspect to the game, one it would have been far better forgetting all together.

The scenery is gorgeous indeed. If you take the time to look at the areas you fly over, in most cases they are incredibly detailed and quite gorgeous. Unfortunately, it is tough to see anything at all, because the game seems to think it is cool if everything looks like you are watching an old filmstrip. Everything is dark and brown, and kind of grainy. Having seen the graphics on the Xbox, I can say they are a bit improved, but not by much. Overall individual screen shots look awesome, but the weird motion effects make it all very hard on the eyes.

All of the haze and dust does add a level of realism - it makes it difficult to actually spot enemy planes. But that angle is totally negated by the completely obvious radar and targeting system. You can target enemies miles away that you can’t physically see yet. So instead of dog-fighting against enemy planes, for the most part you are fighting annoying red and orange triangles.

Oh, and the story. Could this game try any harder to be like Ace Combat? The narrator had virtually the same tone of voice, and the story was told exactly the same way that the story is told there. The thing is - in Ace Combat, it works. You have a fictional war with fictional nations - things need to be explained in greater detail than they do when discussing a war that was very real and one we have seen in countless games before. Painting the protagonists in this game as the same kind of “heroes” at the core of the successful war effort doesn’t work in a real-life situation. Less dreamy and fantastic, more grit and realism was required.

Back to the planes - boy, was that a waste of space. There are a ton of planes that you unlock during the game, and almost all of them perform exactly the same. There are some differences between major plane types, but for the most part, you can complete every fighter mission with any kind of fighter, with about the same level of difficulty. And the crappy brown/grain color crossed over into the menu screens as well, so it isn’t even interesting to go through your available planes to see what they look like.

BOTTOM LINE

This game is a real letdown as a Wii title. It does show that it might be possible to make a great air combat game for the Wii, but they are going to have to let go of the motion sensor (at least, for key functions) to make that a reality, and they are going to have to resist the temptation to cram in extras. There are just enough buttons to account for all of the plane’s controls ([i]thumbstick for movement, up and down on the thumbpad for throttle, right and left for rudder, A for targeting, B for guns, Z for secondary weapons, and I don’t know, maybe C for landing gear, a downward thrust with the nunchuck for any afterburners in a jet game, - and + for Form up/Attack commands to the squad, and maybe even a cool head-look feature with the sensor bar… maybe I am forgetting something, but it seems like this would work[/i]), and it could be done easily without making things awkward.

If you are playing on another console, definitely pass on this game, as there are many other better air combat sims out there. If you have a Wii, just stick in your old Rogue Leader game and play that - it is far superior to this, and it is Star Wars, so there is a geek-appeal there.

As for Blazing Angels - it tries to hard to be something it isn’t, and it totally forgot to make a passable fighter combat game in the process. This one is a real yawn.

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Rating(out of 5):

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