If the name hasn’t given it away, you take the role of a fighter pilot who happens to be the captain of one of the more prominent flight squadrons from World War II. In what is hardly a revelatory move, the story follows the exploits of your Squadron throughout WWII, following numerous significant historic events. Interestingly, your exploits will cover the majority of the war, starting in Europe, through Africa, the Pacific and back to Europe. It’s a good thing that it is expansive, because that only just manages to make up for the fact that this is a by-the-numbers exercise.
As in the Xbox 360 version, you’ll be hopping into the cockpit of the captain of a squadron, with three other pilots to assist you. Each of these pilots has unique attributes. Whenever you’re damaged, you can call on Joe, who will give you a series of button inputs to press, and you’ll manage to fix some of the damage. However, these can only be used sparingly, and on occasions didn't even work, even though we pressed the correct buttons. Tom can be called upon to taunt your enemies and get them off your tail, while angry-at-the-world Frank can be sent off to knock down extra targets, because otherwise, you’ll be left to do it all yourself. Furthermore, you have three formations: Attack, Defense and Formation (back to normal) to give you options throughout your missions.
Blazing can get quite intense at times.
It's just as well that you have these options, because the missions themselves are a rather sedate affair. For the most part, you’ll be required to dogfight your way through numerous planes or strafe a number of structures that happen to be pointed out by a red arrow. Occasionally, you’ll get an objective, such as going out to take a picture, or fire a torpedo at something. Despite some limitations, these more varied sorties come off quite well, as switching between fighting and bombing is rather fun. Otherwise, each of the 20 main campaign missions is an exercise in destroying anything that is marked with red. Still, it seems that the PS3 version has been made a little more difficult, with non-objective enemies hunting you quite aggressively, but it’s not a huge difference. Most of the enemies are still sitting ducks.
Upon completion of the main campaign, a task that will take somewhere between eight and ten hours, you'll unlock the mini-campaign. This is simply an extra bunch of missions that are good to mess around with. You’ve also got the Arcade mode, which puts you up to a series of timed challenges and Ace Duel. Ace Duel is a one-on-one dogfight, which pits you against an Ace pilot in the same plane. Winning earns you a new coat of paint. Furthermore, you have over 40 real-life planes to unlock and use later on.
The standard controls for the game give you the option of either playing with Arcade or Simulation configurations. Everything is quite intuitive, and rather similar to any other flight game seen before on consoles. The objective camera - the one that locks onto your enemy - takes some time to get used to, but ultimately works well. What essentially distinguishes the PS3 version over the Xbox 360 iteration though is the addition of Sixaxis tilt controls. Of the applications of tilt that we have seen so far, Blazing Angels on the PS3 is one of the best examples to date. While not exactly realistic, the tilt controls allow you to control the planes well, and does go a little way towards making the experience more immersive, particularly in tight situations.
No time for a holiday.
However, most players are likely to revert to the normal controls eventually, simply because it’s a little too hard to be accurate with the tilt controls. In trying to keep with being realistic, your guns will only fire in the direction of the reticule. The reticule moves with the plane movements, which is fair given the fact that this is a machine from the 1940s. Still, the tilt controls aren’t conducive to very precise movements. There's room in the future to allow for potential control features such as assistance from the face controls or lock-ons, but precision is an area that the developers will have to look into when looking at how to exploit the Sixaxis.
Blazing Angels has a fairly decent multiplayer component to it as well. You’ve got three solo modes and four team-based modes that can be played with up to 16 players on one map, over the PlayStation Network. In solo, you’ve got Dogfight (deathmatch), Seek and Destroy (kind of like Elimination) and Aces High (like Capture The Flag) where only the Ace can score points. In team modes, again you’ve got Dogfight, Capture The Base, where players attempt to land at the enemy base to score points, and Bombing Run, which sees which team can destroy its ground targets first. Meanwhile, Kamikaze tasks you with protecting your ground targets from the incoming kamikaze pilots. On top of these, there's a split-screen co-op mode to be played offline. The one real problem we had was that the servers were quite often empty, and when we did get a game, it was from the dedicated veterans - newbies beware. Otherwise, the multiplayer runs solidly and is reasonably good.
Graphically, this is the same game which was launched on the Xbox 360 last year, though with a few teething issues. Still, it’s nice to see a lot of the details in the game. The planes are immaculately constructed, and the dense maps have been populated with many buildings (London in particular). The game shines when it comes to the intimate details, and the amount that can be happening on screen at once is impressive. There are some nice blur effects whenever you speed up, or whenever you’re firing away. It manages to work quite well. Unfortunately, a lot of the rolling landscapes look like they could have used some more work. That, and any time you fly through an explosion, the frame rate drops to zero for a good couple of seconds. Finally, we would have expected the game to look better than the 360 version, not just on relative par. Mind you, SD gamers won’t know what the next-gen fuss is about.
A lot can be happening at once.
In terms of sound, the criticism of the audio in the Xbox 360 version sticks here also. The voicing in the game doesn’t seem to be as ill-driven or as offensive as it was in the 360 version, but is simply very repetitive. Certainly, it's too repetitive to last the entire course of the campaign, not to mention the fact that all too often it is incorrect. Often a pilot will comment on a situation way too late, or say something completely wrong. Otherwise, there's some (but not a wide range) appropriate 1940s war music, and flying, shooting and bombing all sounds just as it should. Apart from the repetition, everything just kind of slips into the background, and isn’t particularly distinguishable.
Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII provides us with one of the more compelling arguments behind Sony’s decision to put motion control into the Sixaxis. However, it doesn’t say much for the technology when the Sixaxis option is likely to be cast aside for the traditional scheme. Furthermore, while there is nothing inherently wrong with the game, it's unable to do anything that distinguishes it from the rest of the WWII flight game crowd. It just hasn’t built enough on the Xbox 360 version that preceded it, despite being a marginally better game. As for the Xbox 360 version, it’s a good rental, but not the first title you’d recommend to buy.
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