Aerial combat is here to stay. And I, for one, am glad to see its arrival. I mean, a first-person shooter can have all the mainstay presence it desires, but I would rather have the opportunity to be in the air, making shrapnel out of my airborne and ground-based enemies with a few sprays of bullets. That’s just the thing to get some excitement going, the danger that there really isn’t too much space to hide in when you’re flying in the wide open in a high-speed jet or plane. But that’s just my personal taste.

    So you could tell I had a bit of excitement going through me when I got my hands on Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII, Ubisoft’s first foray into aerial combat for the Xbox 360, following hot on the heels of their much-acclaimed GRAW. Maybe the Ghost Recon game spoiled us a little in what to expect in a military action game, as Squadrons seems a little shallow in comparison, especially in the single-player mode. But it still has its likability, especially if you throw other friends in for the ride.

    As the title explains, you’re a pilot in World War II, and you find yourself teamed up with a ragtag squadron of fellow fighters who fly on a series of missions to help regain crucial land and give a hand to those allies that need a little help. Now, the single player parts of the game should live up to some promise and really involve you, right? Well, sadly, they never do. The training missions, while trying to be helpful, also get a bit tedious, and then once you get to the range of missions that are at hand, you’ll find that most of them are the same, even though the locales change from Dunkirk to Pearl Harbor.

Off into the wild, blue yonder...well, not so blue.

    Part of the tedium of these missions is some pretty lackluster AI. For instance, where some dogfights should be downright exhilirating, they instead come off as quick affairs where you can quickly sneak up behind a plane or ground target and lay waste before they even have any idea what’s going on. To further insult us, Ubisoft hired up some voice actors to try and get some foreign dialogue to get us fired up to take them down, and they sound cornball...and maybe even a bit offensive.