This is what happens when you cut someone off in midair. New 'Angels' a blaze of mediocrity

Flight combat games are like the pizza of the video game world – even when they’re bad, they’re still pretty good.

Ubisoft’s Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII, though, is kind of like the worst pizza you can get. Yes, it’s still okay, but just barely.

Blazing Angels has a lot of what makes flying games fun - a whole bunch of shooting, bombing, technical mumbo jumbo as well as plenty of zigging and zagging. But that’s about all it has. After all the war games coming out nowadays that are packed to the brim with heart-pounding tension and emotion, Blazing Angels is downright boring more often than not. The game consists for the most part of objectives like clearing paths for your allies on the ground or helping down Stukas and the like who are targeting your friends in the skies. That’s all well and good, but I was constantly wishing for something more.

There are admittedly a few different gameplay elements thrown in. One early level has you flying through a sandstorm in Africa where you’re tasked with taking pictures of the enemy from your plane. You have no gun and you’re forced to find the enemy by listening to radio chatter. The more the voices break up and crack, the further you are from the enemy. The clearer they are, the closer you realize you’re getting to where you have to be. It’s a great idea but sadly there just aren’t enough good ideas going around in this game to keep any momentum.

The game looks pretty good from the air - especially the awesome blur effect when you speed up - but it’s almost embarrassing to see some of the details up close. One level has you taking off from an air force base that is being bombed. As you fly on the ground, gaining speed to take off, you’ll fly right by soldiers who are frantically running around as they try to get out of harm’s way. Problem is, these soldiers look like they were made by a 12 year old in his parent’s basement on a Commodore 64. They’re basically stick figures with no faces. It’s really, really bad.

Another annoying, silly problem with the game is the lack of instructions. Yes, the game is pretty simple for the most part and is meant to allow for people to just pick up and play (and developers told us this when we previewed the game a few weeks before its release). But there are a few special moves that need a bit more explaining, but their instructions were relegated to the load screens in between levels. A good example was landing. You won’t have to land very often but the first time we did, we simply couldn’t remember exactly how to and there is no explanation in the instruction manual (yes, it is okay to use that thing once in a while!). Hence, if you miss the specific load screen explaining how to land, then you’ll have to figure it out through trial and error, exploding your plane repeatedly like we did. Very, very frustrating.

There are a few more modes tacked on to add a little more replayability. An Arcade Mode has you downing wave after wave of enemies while Mini-Campaign has you fighting through six different missions where your plane, enemies and map are predefined. The Arcade Mode is fairly challenging and it’s fun to try and beat your old score.

Blazing Angels also features a few decent online modes. If you’re into the whole airplane dogfight thing then you should have a blast here. The games are pretty standard stuff (just like the single player) but in our experience the games ran very smoothly and the menus were simple to navigate.

I really was expecting more from Blazing Angels considering the excellent track record Ubisoft has. The game had a whole lot going for it but somewhere along the way something went wrong and it ended up crashing and burning.