Blazing Angels (Xbox 360, Xbox, PC)

Blazing Angels (pictured) isn't even as good as the 10-year-old Overlord.

Herald rating: * *

This game is full of angels but you won't be singing its praises.

I was really looking forward to my first Xbox 360 World War II fighter-ace game. The genre is tapped out already, leaving mind-blowing graphics as the only point of difference in developments.

Blazing Angels lets you do exactly what it promises on the box: "fight WWII's most epic and action-packed air battles from Western Europe to the Pacific".

What it doesn't do is deliver the type of graphics offered by other early starters on the 360.

It's playable - but only just. The controls, game-play and some of the graphics seem like they've been lifted from old computer games like Overlord, which came out 10 years ago and is better than this.

You don't need an Xbox 360 to play a game like Blazing Angels and therein lies it's biggest flaw - it doesn't cut it in the next-generation gaming world. While Ghost Recon and Need for Speed have a modern lustre about them, Blazing Angels is decidedly old-school.

From a distance the panoramas of London and Paris are pretty, but when you get up close the objects are ill-formed. The enemy aircraft prowling the sky are encased in bright red boxes, killing any sense of reality.

Bombs leave no trace once the explosion clears, planes simply catch fire and plunge to the ground - there's no debris, no Burnout Revenge-style carnage.

The game is also far too easy, especially considering that when your aircraft is damaged you can simply call up your ever-present mechanic, Joe, to talk you through some repairs.

The biggest flaw is that there is no cockpit camera, so you have to play the whole game following your plane from behind, lining up the enemy with a target that floats in the middle of the screen. War games are meant to be better than this.

PG, $130