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Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of WWII

Arcade-style air combat games have always been a bit of a soft spot for me. I'm a big fan of the Ace Combat series on PS2 (and soon the Xbox 360), and actually found the first Blazing Angels to be a passable plane shooter. Now Ubisoft is putting out a sequel, and this time it's about the Secret Missions of WWII - prototype nazi rocket planes, secret bases, cloak & dagger stuff. Sounds like fun.

I should start off saying that Blazing Angels 2 has very little to do with actual simulation of airplanes. It's an arcade game, complete with arcade-style features. As you take out targets while completing missions you collect prestige points, and use them to buy upgrades to your planes (one purchase fits all of your planes) or to your squad, and completing missions unlocks additional flyable planes of all kinds - American, British, German, Japanese, Russian... some common WWII vintage warbirds, some rare experimental planes and some obscure things that never saw action in World War 2.

Secret Missions

Even for an arcade shooter, the concept of the game is very interesting - fly daring missions around the world during World War 2, with all kinds of prototype planes, doing things too sensitive for the public to ever know about. Sadly Ubisoft has wasted the concept with a game that is a total mess.

While things like simplified flight model and unrealistic amount of armaments together with large number of opponents to shoot down are something I'm willing to suspend by disbelief over in a game like this, Blazing Angels 2 goes far beyond "arcade action" and firmly into the silly land. Any resemblance of reality is thrown out with features such as in-flight repairs and extra ammunition gained from shooting specially marked planes or ground targets. The available special weapons also take a rapid turn from theoretically possible to pure science fiction along the way.

Then there are the missions. Oh my.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: Mission detailsPage 3: Bugs, graphics & hardwarePage 4: Presentation, conclusions & Scores

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