Developer: Ubisoft Romania
ESRB Rating: Teen
Genre: Flight Simulation
Platform: PC, PS3, Xbox 360
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release Date: 9/18/2007
What is Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of WWII?
Blazing Angels 2 is a flight sim that is remarkably light on dogfighting and actually focuses more on destroying ground targets and fancy flying in tight spaces. Not to say there aren’t plenty of planes to shoot down, but the nature of the game revolves around the “secret” missions of WWII where both the Axis and the Allies have access to extremely high tech weaponry like guided missiles, tesla coils, and jet fighters. Suffice it to say that you have plenty of weapons to deal with enemy planes.
The plot revolves around your squad fighting the German Special Weapons division and preventing them from unleashing weapons of mass destruction on Allied forces. You will have to fly all over the globe, from Cairo, to China, all the way to San Francisco to capture experimental planes and technology, prevent enemy attacks, and save story characters as they inevitably get captured. The missions are varied and unique, as are the mission locales and the planes you can fly. The game also supports cooperative play, in addition to traditional multiplayer modes.
What does this game do well?
Blazing Angels 2 is a beautiful game. The skyline is picturesque and the planes are highly detailed. Since each mission takes place in a unique part of the globe, the game remains fresh throughout and whether its mountains, countryside, or densely populated cities. The detail remains high even when you are buzzing the tops of the trees with your plane, and there is no slow down even with 50+ enemies on the screen trying to light you up.
One of the game’s best features is that you can buy upgrades for your plane with prestige points. Prestige points are gained by destroying enemy forces, finishing missions under a certain time threshold, and collecting “stunt” icons which are usually placed under bridges or in narrow spaces between buildings, etc. The types of upgrades you can buy vary from extremely useful to almost pointless, but the good ones have a noticeable effect on your performance throughout the campaign. It’s important to make sure you get good scores on the early missions, by staying ahead of the curve you can buy the upgrades you need for the missions when they are the most useful.
Scoring well on the missions also unlocks new planes for you to fly, and there are a lot of them. Not all of the planes are worth flying, but in most cases you can pick between 2 or 3 decent planes for each mission. However, some missions require you to fly a certain plane like when you have to pretend to be a German luftwaffe pilot and shoot down the enemy planes outside of the visual range of the ground crews below. Other times you will take all the time to choose the plane that you feel will suit the mission only to land within the first 2 minutes and take off in something else. The game also lets you unlock skins for your planes, and in multiplayer you can customize your planes in a variety of ways. It’s a nice touch.
In many missions you have wingmen that assist you in your dominance of the skies. You can order them to engage targets at their leisure or stay with you and defend your plane like a good wingman should. Each wingman also has a special ability that you can activate. One pilot will draw fire away from you and onto himself, one will repair your plane at certain points during the mission, and another will go on a rampage and destroy a whole bunch of enemy planes for a short time. It appears that your wingmen are invincible, and they certainly rack up their share of kills so it’s nice to have them along for the ride. Ordering them around is easily achieved with the D-pad.
What could this game have done better?
The truly enjoyable moments in Blazing Angels 2 are few and far between. It’s much more common to be frustrated; either with the controls, the mission objectives, or both. The left analog stick controls your aim, while the right analog stick controls your speed. There are virtually no flight sim aspects to the game, you just press the right stick forward to go faster and down to go slower with no fear of stalling or losing airspeed while climbing. However, the right analog stick also makes you barrel roll if you press it even a little bit to the left or right, which usually is the last thing you want to do when you’re slowing down or speeding up. A great deal of precision is required both in flying and in aiming. Your targets are extremely small most of the time, and the early missions are some of the hardest because you are getting used to the controls and you don’t have any of the good weapons yet.
The controls in Blazing Angels 2 are inverted, meaning you pull down on the left analog stick to increase altitude, and up on the stick to go down. This makes sense for a flight sim, but if you don’t play flight sims it may take a mission or two to get used to. At certain points in the game you man the turrets in a bomber or fly TV guided missiles, and you aren’t actually flying a plane. For some reason, the controls for these sections are not inverted, so up is up and down is down. Frankly it sucks because you just spent a couple hours with the controls one way, and then for a couple minutes you have unlearn all that and still try to aim with precision. It doesn’t even make sense because with the TV guided missiles, you’re still flying so the controls should still be inverted, and when opertaing a turret to aim up you pull the handle lower to raise the barrels. By all accounts the controls should still be inverted, and the fact that they are not is doubly frustrating.
Control issues aside, the missions themselves vary from straightforward and fun to convoluted, confusing, or just plain hard. The developers attempted to make missions varied and interesting, so there’s bound to be a few missions that aren’t your favorite, but the game exacerbates this to transform dislike into disdain. One of the early annoyances comes in Paris where you have to shoot down planes while both you and your target are out of sight of the anti-aircraft guns on the ground. Then you have destroy roadblocks and other ground targets nestled between tall buildings while still remaining outside the visual range of the AA guns. But for me, the roadblocks didn’t show up on my radar so I didn’t even know what I was supposed to shoot at. Only when out of frustration I tried to blow up the target I was supposed to protect did I realize that it was being detained by an invisible roadblock and was able to finish the mission after a dozen tries.
There’s also a mission in the Himalayas where the wind blows your plane around so you can’t aim. That’s always fun. There’s also a mission where you have to destroy 2 out of 4 engines on a plane, but the weapon they give you to do it with always destroys all 4 engines causing you to fail the mission. In general it’s just difficult to react to new mission objectives, especially when the objective flashes on the screen and the characters start talking, but you’re kind of busy actually shooting down planes and playing the game. But the worst annoyance of all is that you have to double confirm all of the menus. Even when you fail a mission, and the only thing you can do is restart, it asks you if you’re sure you want to do this. I believe the game is asking you a philosophical question to which the answer becomes increasingly clear as time goes on.
Despite some headaches, the action portions of the game are fun, especially if you like flight sims. But I was disappointed that there wasn’t much dogfighting in the game. You unlock unguided rockets fairly early in the campaign and then the skies are undeniably in your control. The other weapons are novel and some of them are really fun to use, but the rockets are one-shot kills and if you buy the prestige upgrade that causes them to detonate even if they just get close to the enemy, you don’t even need machineguns anymore. Later you get guided rockets which are fire-and-forget at a range of 3000m. At that point nothing with wings even stands a chance. It just seems odd to me that your primary role is that of a bomber, and I imagine players looking for a flight sim would be disappointed by this as well.
Should I buy this game?
The best part about Blazing Angels 2 is the credits, because then you know you never have to play it again. Its existence reminds me how much I miss X-wing vs. TIE Fighter and how foolish Lucasarts is to abandon such a successful franchise in favor of Empire at War and other mediocre titles in more popular genres. I do think that Blazing Angels 2 is a good rental for players just looking to get in the air and shoot some planes down for a weekend. The campaign is just barely 8 hours long, and you’ll be sick of it somewhere in the 5th hour and you can decide whether to tough it out or not. But as a purchase, Blazing Angels 2 is disappointing to say the least.
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