Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of WWII
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ESRB:
Language - Mild,Violence
Publisher: UbiSoft Genre(s): Action Home Page: http://www.blazingangels2.com
Presentation problems Swordfish taking out Cruisers at an Italian port, pretty nice searchlight effects. The UI elements are designed for a single resolution, as is unfortunately common with console ports. Due to this, they are too large for 640x480 and slightly too small at 1600x1200. As an obvious mistake, the bomb sight view used in some missions is designed for a single resolution, and at a high resolution you get a black box with the bomb sight showing ground in the middle, and large borders around the box showing more of the landscape. Radio chatter tries to liven up things, with both friendly and hostile pilots blabbing away during the missions. These snippets are either scripted exposition covering the mission goals, or reactions to things occurring in the game. The scripted bits work fine, but the reactionary stuff is truly poor. When a German pilot of a plane that you just blew to fifteen small pieces yells to the radio "I can't shake him", or comments how good pilot you are, it tends to destroy the illusion. It looks like the canned lines of the pilots were made mostly for cases where you land a few machinegun rounds and the enemy keeps flying, but they are played after every hit - even when the weapon used is a heavy cannon and what little bits of the plane remain are arcing towards the ground. The same inconsistent chatter is true for friendly planes: they always yell like they (or you) are getting torn to bits. "You are taking heavy fire" sounds silly when your plane is at 95% and you just took two stray machinegun rounds and are in no real danger. Silly game Japanese carrier submarine(!) launching kamikaze rocket planes. So what went wrong? This time, I must say, pretty much everything. The only solid part of the game is the initial concept, and beyond that everything is more or less flawed. There are numerous completely unforgivable bugs that would turn up immediately if someone would just sit down and play the game from start to completion once. The fact that you can't even land a plane in the only playable control mode ("simulation") because the key used to lower the landing gear simply doesn't work is nothing short of incredible. It's like we're being offered an early beta build that somehow ended up in the duplication plants and was packaged and shipped without anyone noticing anything wrong with it. Even if you'd forgive all the technical faults of Blazing Angels 2, you'd still end up with a below average game weighted down by utterly silly missions, poor presentation (such as lieutenant written as leftenant) and clumsy gameplay. When you add up all the technical issues to the mix, the end result is a box that should be handled like a barrel of radioactive waste. It's sad as I very much like arcade style air combat games, but no amount of post-release patching will save this one due to the deep flaws in the actual mission design and story. Summary of YouGamers Hardware TestingThe publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:
To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:
ScoresTo learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.
Patches and updatesJust as this review was finished, Ubisoft released the v1.01 update to Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of WWII using the built-in auto-updater. Based on the ReadMe, it appears to fix the major bugs, including the following;
Sadly no patch can fix the outright silly missions, and overall the review still stands, even after the most obvious technical issues are now fixed.
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