Run, live to fly, fly to live. Aces high. A blaze of boring

As the first flight combat game for the Xbox 360, Ubisoft's Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII doesn't have a lot of competition. Which is a good thing, because it's got more ups and downs than a pilot doing approach training.

Blazing Angels, which is also available for the original Xbox and the PC, is a good concept backed by solid visuals -- but, ultimately it fails to fully satisfy.

Instead of being the aerial version of, say, Medal of Honor, the single-player campaign is a string of disconnected missions that see you battling wave after wave of planes or dropping tonnes of ordnance on ground targets without a lot of variety to spice things up.

The campaign does cover the gamut from dogfighting German Stukas over London to fending off Japanese Zeros at Pearl Harbor, but nothing much changes from mission to mission except the types of planes you're shooting down and the cheesy accents of your foes, who repeat the same silly one-liners over and over.

Don't get me wrong, the dogfighting is well done and a lot of fun, at first.

And the odd mission where you have to do something different, like locate and photograph German bases in North Africa by following radio chatter, is nifty.

But because there's so little variety in Blazing Angels, it becomes monotonous after a while unless you're totally in love with the game's frantic furballs.

There are a few other niggling issues, such as the way you can't customize the control scheme at all -- I desperately wanted to reverse the thumbstick assignments so that the control mimicked a Halo-style layout.

Instead, during especially hairy dogfights, I frequently found myself diving into the ground when I meant to increase my speed.

The visuals are also an oddly mixed bag. The plane models look great, and the sprawling cities are breathtaking, from London's Houses of Parliament to the Eiffel Tower in Paris.

But ground targets like tanks and trucks look oddly crude, and there's some very noticeable slowdown when you're flying low and strafing, especially through smoke.

The game's saving grace is its online play, which is a total hoot. There's a wide variety of multiplayer game modes, and flying alongside human wingmen instead is way more fun that teaming up with your cliches-in-a-cockpit A.I. pals.

BOTTOM LINE

Arcade flight sim fans, World War II junkies or those who want to fly the unfriendly skies online might have lots to like here. Everyone else should keep one hand firmly on the ejection seat lever.