Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII for Wii Reviews by Gamers

This is a good game; graphics are good, but a very busy fight can overwhelm the console.

Controls are fair; "classic" style (using the nunchuck stick) works fine; motion controls are not sensitive enough and hard to use.

The flight sim is pretty decent for a console game, but not as good as I'd hope.

Gameplay is pretty good; missions are broken into "objectives", and if you die you've got the opportunity to restart at the last accomplished objective, rather than the beginning of the mission.

Load times are long, but only at the beginning of a mission; the game is very smooth in-flight.

Overall I am enjoying this game; replay value is pretty good, controls are good, graphics are good.

Addition of a rudder control and shorter load times would help.

Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII clearly never intended to be a flight simulator, so fans looking for realistic flight physics and historically accurate plane dynamics should skip this title- you'll be frustrated beyond measurement.

Blazing Angels is an arcade shooter, through and through. Your plane can't do 80% of what a real plane could do, for example, a barrel roll. Immelman? Forget it. You don't even have decent control of the plane's yaw control, so strafing ground targets is tricky.

That said, aspiring couch pilots will be able to pick up the Wii control scheme quickly and start hunting bogeys right away. The Nunchuk is your flight stick and the Wiimote serves as a command console. Holding the nunchuk like an imaginary flight stick is immediately intuitive and fun. The physics are rubbery enough (and the enemies delicate enough) that the control limitations don't hamper your combat performance. In the first few missions, you'll score dozens more kills than the best real WWII aces nailed during their whole careers.

The voice acting for the Americans (you and your wingmen, taking some more liberties with history) is well done and at times even funny, but the repetitiveness may grate on you after a few dogfights. The British voice acting is terrible.

The games flight controls, though intuitive, are limited and the amorphous relativity of the nunchuck got on my nerves after a few hours of playtime. The nunchuck seems to reset itself after a while- i.e. you're leaning hard left trying to out-turn your prey and then when you straighten up, all of the sudden holding the nunchuck vertical is turning your plane right. If you climb hard to get a good diving run for bombing ground targets, you stand a good chance of turning your plane into a lawn dart when you try to pull out of that dive. It makes you want to rotate the nunchuk with both hands (in a panic!) to try to compensate.

In short: Casual gamers, enjoy. Hard core sim fans: avoid.