Blazing Angels is a game that simply does not take advantage of the 360’s processing power, when I first started playing the game I was lured into the simple look of the English countryside as I went through the training paces that the game has you do to become familiar with your standard piloting controls. Take off, accelerate, tracking your prey, shooting, dropping items (bombs or leaflets) and dogfighting basics. The initial play of the game, like I said looked pretty good. The local village, the enemy planes, the overcast English sky, pretty good.
But then as you move from training to the actual missions, something started to happen… the graphics began to fail. Plane’s would skip in the air, there was slowdown when a dogfight would get busy and the countryside began to get more and more plain. This was starting to look more and more like a PS2 title then a 360 title, not good at all. In all fairness, the game does do a comendable job of capturing the look of the different WWII era fighter planes, the Warhawk, the Corsair, the Wildcat and the Mustang to name a few of the 42 that eventually become available. In fact planes from four different countries are featured in Blazing Angels; Great Britain, The U.S., Germany and Japan. But where authenticity became more important, the game’s graphics began to slide.
Now obviously the game isn’t horrible, for that you would need to play X-men, and at this point I will admit that the missions that you do are varied and interesting. Each mission ususally has several objectives that help drive the story, for instance in one mission you may have to protect a bridge from German bombers taking it out and therefore trapping allied forces.
Well once the allied troops have crossed the bridge, you then have to destroy it so the pursuing German Panzers cannot catch up to them. All of this is occuring as your allied forces are doing battle with the Germans, so you must learn how to dodge enemy fighters while dropping bombs on small objects. But again, the game fails to capture a true visual experience.
Pulling the trigger highlights your enemy and in doing so, you don’t really see they details of your prey. In that bridge bombing mission for instance, the Panzers (tanks) appear to be all black, I didn’t see any real detail in them and quite frankly, I wanted to see the tank treads rolling or part of the tank flying when they blew up, but instead, it was a canned explosion.
