Another day. Another war bond.
Ubisoft has returned with a new Second World War flight simulator offering, Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII. Unlike Heroes of the Pacific which the company put out last year, Blazing Angels takes place during the entire war and not just during the Pacific campaign. Starting off in Dunkirk, France, you fly a training mission and then you are quickly flung into a series of battles as the leader of a squadron of fighters as you fail to protect and evacuate Dunkirk. Then you move on to London, North Africa and so on. The game also includes arcade-style missions, one-on-one ace duels, multiplayer and online components.
The graphics are quite crisp when run at the highest settings but still look reasonably good when run at a lower level. The sound and music are also rich, though at times it gets annoying to listen to your wingmen or your enemies spouting out the same lines over and over.
The game is far more arcade and less story-oriented in its feel than Heroes of the Pacific and the repetition of the various missions becomes a little monotonous over time: Take out the bombers, bomb the German columns to the south, protect your wingman Joe from the Messerschmitts, bomb the German columns to the west, protect your wingman Tom from the Messerschmitts etc. etc.
To be fair, much of most of these types of games involves bombing or shooting things and the game conceivably could prove more entertaining if the planes were easier to maneuver. This game does not seem to be intended for the PC as the controls are just plain awkward. It's difficult to make gradual movements with the keyboard and so the plane often jerks around, which is extremely annoying when you're trying to line up a shot, because you can only shoot in the direction you're facing.
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Using the mouse allows a slightly smoother play, but unless you have a snazzy gaming mouse, it probably only has, at most, three buttons and a scroll wheel. So you'll often need to use a combination of the mouse and keyboard to play. This may not seem like much of a chore, but it's one a thing to use the mouse to aim your gun in a game like Halo, but to actually try and fly with it, while using the keyboard to provide additional movements is near impossible at times. Also, unless you have the entire length of a dining room table to move the mouse around, you're going to have difficulty. Even the simplest of movements get harder if you constantly have to pick the mouse up and put it back down on the pad to continue flying, especially if you keep the default up-down reverse Zaxxon settings.
The joystick obviously offers the best option for control but the preset controls for the game are quite odd and, for me at least, changing the layout was not possible. Every time I attempted to change one of the joystick controls, it automatically changed it to “slider up.” Granted, this could be a problem with my Logitech joystick and not the game, but I don't typically have these problems when calibrating the controls for other games, so the sensors might be a little too sensitive here. And, as far as I know, my joystick doesn't have a slider, so I'm not even sure what the game was responding to.
One saving grace in the controls, however, is the camera view button. By pressing it, the camera angle changes to show you exactly where your target is, so although it does become slightly more difficult to fly in this view, you always know exactly where you have to go. When you manage to get a handle on these controls, some of the dogfights can be fun.
One further caveat, however, about this game is a stability issue. Blazing Angels includes StarForce's encryption copy-protection. Although the digital rights management software is supposed to protect against illegal copying, many gamers have complained in various message boards that the newest version of these drivers run at a core access level and can override hardware devices, such as optical drives, as well as cause system crashes. Although I'm not sure as to how much proof there is to all of this, whether intentional or not, my diagnostic software did attribute a system restart to one of these StarForce files, which is a little odd considering I wasn't playing the game at the time.
If you look in your device manager and pick the “Show hidden devices” option in the view pull-down menu, you will then be able to see four StarForce devices listed under “Non-Plug and Play Drivers.” You can remove these and it doesn't seem to affect the game. Though I'm not sure if any files actually get uninstalled this way. I do know that at least four files (sfdrv01.sys, sfhlp02.sys, sfsync03.sys and sfvsf02.sys) remain in your C:/WINDOWS/system32/drivers directory. If you remove these then the game will attempt reinstall these so-called “libraries.” They should be removed when you uninstall the game but you should probably should double-check to be sure. If you want to be extra careful, you can download the StarForce Removal Tool Utility from http://www.onlinesecurity-on.com.
According to an April 18 article on gamesindustry.biz, Ubisoft will not use StarForce encryption on its future titles as a result of a class action suit filed against them for these stability issues.
Hopefully whatever copy-protection software Ubisoft switches to won't be as troublesome.
WHAM! Rating: |
5.5 out of 10 |
ESRB Rating: |
T (Teen) |
Official Web Site: |
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