Published by: Ubisoft
Developed by: Ubisoft Romania
Release Date: March 20, 2007
Genre: Flight Action
Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII
Intro
Ubisoft's Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII is one of the company’s earliest offerings for the Wii. The game packaging and adverts promised many things - “Experience a true feeling of flight”, “Use the Wii Remote™ and Nunchuck™ for intuitive aircraft control to experience a new sensation in flight”, “Action packed WWII air combat including all-new Preemptive Strike and New Georgia missions” and “Pilot 46 authentic aircraft including the P-51 Mustang, British Spitfire, German Bf109, and the Japanese Zero” among many other claims.
Story/Premise/Setting
Blazing Angels attempts to tell the fictitious tale of an American pilot caught up in the maelstrom of WWII. The storyline starts off with a narration and map of the characters current location in the States and briefly gives an overview of the Eagle squadron (American pilots that flew in the defense of Briton prior to the United State’s official entry into the conflict). You’ll start off in the obligatory training mission (with a bit of a twist) and from there you will be given progressively tougher assignments. These will range from the standard “defend the ground troop” strafing and bombing runs as well as photo recon to even piloting the formidable B-17 “Flying Fortress”. While you start and end your career in the European theater you’ll find yourself being reassigned to the Pacific theater “just in time” for the attack on Pearl Harbor and the resulting campaign before heading back to fly the last air missions over Berlin.
image via gamerankings
The game does have a wide variety of missions (20) and aircraft (46 unlockable, 34 usable in multi-player). Each mission area is fairly unique and while some of the building graphics are very apparently used in different places the rest of the background images are unique enough to give each setting a very different “feel”. The aircraft vary widely – from the basic “Gladiator” trainer to the exotic German Me 262. Each can be upgraded via the “Mini Campaign” and Arcade” challenges and you can even give them a custom paint job by completing each of their “Ace Duel” challenges.
Graphics
Ubisoft Bucharest has made an interesting choice of graphics and color palette – they decided to go with the sepia toned old news reel color scheme. This gives the game a very dated look especially when you contrast it with the more modern day look of Heatseeker. While gives an overall “old” look to the graphics but I can’t help but not that it tends to give a “muddy” look. This does help portray the WWII aspect of the game but tends to take away from the overall feel of “being there”. The scenes and aircraft themselves are fairly well done. The ground targets do suffer visible damage and the aircraft will trail smoke when damaged as well as blow up fairly well with the explosions not being too similar and parts flying off giving the player a sense that the opponent is kaput. But in the end a general crispness is lacking and the game just doesn’t have a polished look to it.
Controls
There are five different control schemes which use either the Wii-mote only or the Wii-mote/nunchuck and each have an “arcade” and “simulation” mode. If you have played a flying simulator n a PC using a joystick and throttle combo then you’ll find a scheme that comes close to duplicating more expensive controllers. It’s clear the developers wanted to give the players enough choices so as to find one that best suits there style.
But… the controls just don’t work that well. While 1940’s aircraft were not “fly-by-wire” aircraft that turn on a dime these feel just a bit too sloppy and loose. And given that in multi-player mode I found myself in an uncommanded inverted rolling left dive that I had to roll all the way through to recover from… well that just jarred me out of the experience way too often. And even though the aircraft are shown to have different flying characteristics it’s not very apparent until you fly very different aircraft from very different periods of the war. This may be some what real but it didn’t make me choose any other than my favorite aircraft (Spitfire IX or FW 190A) if I could. Altogether not the best flying experience.
no immeem tracks available
Sound
The sound track is a generally grand score – majestic sounding tracks trying to give a sense of the magnitude of the conflict as well as a kind of grandeur. While not anything to take home awards it does give the overall impression that one is in a larger than one’s own life conflict.
The voice acting is somewhat okay. There are those who have said that the main character to too somber, even boring. While I didn’t expect a “It’s a mee! Mario!” I still didn’t get the impression that there was a lot of difference between the opening “somber but determined”, the middle “gritty but determined” and the ending “hopeful but determined” voice tones. The in game voices are okay but a bit too repetitive – I can stand only so many “He’s on your six” when no one is before I start yelling back at the screen. But it is real voices and in a plethora of games that don’t even try to include them this is a welcome addition. Glad to see it but not seeing it that well done.
The different sounds of guns firing are fairly unique and do give a very good sense of what you have mounted on your plane – from the tinny sounds of the light machine gun on the trainer to the quick thumping of the cannons on the heavy fighters you know what kind of pain you’re dishing out. The sound of incoming fire and pings as the rounds hits your ride is well done though I can’t say I have any real experience in this. 
Overall the sounds are a positive part of the game.
Game Play
And again here is where the game starts to show its shortcomings. While the game does have some fun elements most notably the wide variation of missions and aircraft it just doesn’t feel all that much different. Yes, there are only so many things you can do differently in a “realistic” setting but after bombing so many targets and shooting down just so many enemy airplanes it starts to get a bit stale.
The upside of this being a “WWII flying shooter” as opposed to a flight sim is that you’ll never run out of bullets or have your gun overheat, you can drop as many bombs as you wants as they reappear after a short time, and you can even repair your own plane while it’s in the air by following a button combo as it appears on the screen. The many checkpoints that appear help keep the frustration level down as there will be times that a poorly aimed bomb will keep you from finishing the scenario within the time limit. And with different profiles you can challenge a friend or family member to finish a mission in a shorter time or with a better ranking.
The downside is.. scratch that… downsides are that there is no online mode and the multiplayer mode has all the shortcomings of any other; not only do you have an arrow that points to your opponent so does he and you both can see each others at the same time. The half a screen view keeps you from seeing him if he’s just above or below you in time to react with the correct bank or turn. So not only can you not show off your skills to the world but you’ll be severely challenged to shoe them off to your friends.
One mission is particular (Holding Guadalcanal) pretty much killed the experience – you’re given the task of landing a crippled plane but it’s so badly shot up that any pilot with a normal sense of self-preservation would have simply pointed the nose toward the ocean and parachuted out over his own airbase. It’s not just difficult but near impossible. Quite the black mark on otherwise fairly well done campaign scenarios.
Wrap-up
So does this game deliver all that it was advertised to be? No. It just about fails to deliver on the most important promise (“Experience a true feeling of flight”) and the control system, while “intuitive”, doesn’t give a good enough sense of being in control of the airplane. The sound is well done and it does have real voices. The number of aircraft and missions are more than sufficient and the action is “packed”. So, you do get good parts of a game but only an average overall gaming experience.
Score
I give Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII a 6.0/10. If you’re looking for a WWII flight experience with a bit of history thrown in to make it interesting this might be the game for you. For the remaining 99.98% of Wii owners we’ll keep hoping that a much better flying experience comes along very soon.
Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII Review
