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WonderdogSoftware.Com - The latest updated Video Game Walkthrough; Game Guide

Also On:  XBOX  |  360 

Looking back on games is a notoriously unreliable exercise, even for reviewers who've penned hundreds of critiques. If you love a game to bits, it's only natural to defend its faults and gloss over the problems you encountered. Those silly difficulty spikes, the glitchy graphics, the bits where it crashed. And it's just as bad the other way around, too. People always tend to deliver righteous bile, when the truth is generally somewhere in between. And that's the tormented, enjoyable, hateful, delightful topsy-turvy world of Blazing Angels in a nutshell.

 

It's hard to even start to address Ubi's World War II flight combat title with any real clarity, when it occurs to you that there are at least four out of the 18 campaign missions that are among the most intensely irritating of any game that we've come across since Driver 3 caused the destruction of two joypads almost two years ago. Missions that render your pleasant enjoyment of this generally above average game null and void at a stroke, and make you question whether any normal human beings tested the game - and why their feedback was so obviously ignored.

 

For the first few missions, Blazing Angels seems reasonably up to scratch; albeit with some instantly questionable design decisions (more of which in a moment). It follows the standard arcade-style flight-combat template in a way that fans of Crimson Skies and Secret Weapons Over Normandy will be familiar with. It's the same, solid mixture of intense dog-fighting and daring bombing raids that you'd expect, set over all the familiar theatres of war during WWII - but now with added High Dynamic Range.