Considering the number of shooting and driving games that are produced, I'm surprised that we don't see more flying games of some sort. Of those that have been published in the last three years or so, they've all been firmly rooted at the action/arcade end of the realism scale. Blazing Angels is no exception – taking battles from the Second World War and perverting them and the aircraft used within them for the purpose of creating some action-packed dogfighting.
In the main campaign you play the role of an unnamed Captain of a flight of four American pilots who participate in various pivotal battles of WWII, from the evacuation at Dunkirk to the attack on Pearl Harbour. In all of these you're rarely the only Allied aircraft, but you're usually only one of a few fighters, and the aircraft you fly ranges wildly from mission to mission – from British RAF Spitfires with mounted rockets (eh...?) to Yankee P51's and even the odd Axis aeroplane for some infiltration missions. As already mentioned, aside from the setting and model of the aeroplanes, this isn't even a remotely realistic game – ammo and fuel is unlimited, you get to do repairs mid-air and all planes have secondary weapons, such as rockets, bombs and torpedoes. You'll see a few landmarks when flying around London and Paris, but don't expect anything geographically accurate.
Whilst flying along the game looks pretty nice, and there's an impressive draw distance, not to mention some really nice effects as you tag an enemy plane from behind and their plane bursts into flames and billows out smoke as it falls to earth. In quite a few battles, Pearl Harbour being one, you get an impressive array of activity around you – there's a real sense of chaos with the enemy fighters buzzing around whilst the ground installations and boats get hammered. The problem is that it's all paid for by everything bar the planes looking rubbish even moderately close up, and while I liked the planes bursting into flames, most of the other effects are poor – when planes hit the ground they just explode vertically upwards, and damaged ships just smoke instead of being properly on fire.
The action is good though – the dogfighting especially so – you press ‘A’ to lock onto your closest target, and B to your greatest threat. By squeezing the left trigger, the camera then pans round to view your locked target, allowing you to keep them in view as you try and pull onto their tail. It's easily overused and can make the dogfights a monotonous sequence of locking on and then looping round until you get onto the enemy, but when used simply to help you latch onto the tail of an enemy it really works well. When you're managing to get a bead on the enemy they'll try all sorts of manoeuvres to shake you, and they can be quite proficient at latching onto you too if you don't pay attention. To help you spot and identify other units they're highlighted using different types of marker, depending on the type of unit, and whether they're friendly. It's nice to be able to quickly identify what you're after, but it does mean that you spend a lot of time chasing red brackets instead of enemy aircraft.
The problem is that while the game sets up a tense atmosphere with the various historical settings and some tight dogfighting, it manages to almost completely destroy any chance of you feeling any of this by making your wingmen chat away like a bunch of schoolgirls. They're overly jingoistic, unfunny, and there are only a few different phrases repeatedly trotted out for you when you down an enemy, or when hit by an enemy. I can see they've put these characters in to help build a sense of squadron camaraderie, but as they never actually get shot down (unless you fail a section of a couple of the missions), and there's no actual plot or running thread during the campaign, they just spend most of their time annoying you and thus take vastly more away from the game than they bring to it. What's nearly as bad is that you hear the quips of the enemy pilots – all in English, but with dodgy stereotypical accents. When a Japanese pilot yelled 'Banzai!' and the game subtitled it as 'Bonzai!', I didn't know whether to laugh or cry…
The campaign mode is all done in half a dozen hours, despite some particularly difficult and annoying missions towards the end, but there's plenty you can still do after that – there are dogfight and bombing mini missions, as well as a set of dogfighting and duelling scenarios, plus you can go back and get all of the top rankings for the campaign, if you can stand the radio chatter.
Probably the best, if least heralded, feature is the online play. As well as the usual single and team deathmatches there's a few nice squad-based games in there, and you can play the campaign missions co-op online too. The games all seem to be smooth and enjoyable, and they've even stopped people continually circling by making your view slowly black out as you pull tight turns. The game modes are not deep enough to keep you going forever, but they're nice for an hour every now and then.
Overall, Blazing Angels isn't a bad game. It's not great, and it's very debatable as to whether it deserves the £10 premium for the 360 version over the Xbox version, but it's definitely worth consideration (maybe a rental) for those spoiling for a dogfight.
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