So all we need now is a smooth learning curve, enemy airplanes and a whole lot of fun. What we get instead are flying red boxes, comrades that feel more like a built-in cheat system and level after level of the same thing.

The title starts with you taking control of an American volunteer pilot-in-training in the UK during World War II. After being introduced to a fellow American, he shows you all you need to know on mastering the flying of the plane and the targeting and destruction of random explosive items. Once the training winds down a few enemies are spotted infiltrating your airspace and within seconds you are ordered to test your new skills on this poor sap. And with that the game starts.

The game itself is mission-based; some are for recon but the majority follow the same structure: shoot down plane, bomb installation, shoot down planes, get plane off your tail, bomb more installations and follow it up with taking down the rest of the enemy planes. While this may seem standard for your typical fighter sim/arcade, it does get old pretty quickly. Thankfully Ubisoft realised this and included the added ability of commanding a squadron. You start with simple "keep formation/attack enemy/help me" commands, and over the duration of the missions you come to know three other members of the Blazing Angels a little more intimately and they will help out whenever you call out for them.

Joe is the guy you call out for when your plane is in trouble and is likely to burst into flames any moment. With a quick shout over the radio, he gives you a secret code that only he knows, a code so powerful that by merely pushing some buttons in the right combination your plane will be miraculously fixed. While it's not expected to find a place to land every time you need his help, and it is a different code every time you need one, you can use his services an unlimited amount of times during each level, therefore basically making you immortal and ensuring that the only way you will fail a mission is by forgetting Joe is around, or crashing into a building. But more on the crashing later.

Tom is the tough guy of the squadron; when you need to get the enemy riled up and off your tail, he's the man for the job. With a quick press of a button, Tom taunts the enemy into getting you off their mind and they immediately pounce on him. So where is the flaw in this? How about the fact that it simply makes the game too easy. Tom cannot be shot down. In fact, none of the Angels can. Would the enemy have decided against taking you down if they knew their new foe were invincible? It doesn't seem too likely, and now they're off your tail you can easily track them down and send them to their own fiery hell. It's an automatic "leave me alone" button... the game isn't hard enough to warrant an option like this, let alone the ability to use it whenever you want.

Lastly there is Frank. Frank is the golden boy and will stick his neck on the line for a complete stranger any day of the week. With a quick press of his call button he'll break formation and head out with a Kamikaze outlook on life. Luckily for Frank, he too is invulnerable and will take down a good three or four planes before heading back into formation. With a squadron like this why do they even need a rookie volunteer pilot as their commander?

The graphics are a mixed bag. The prominent landmarks in every mission look great, and are an experience to fly over and around, but for every decent-looking landmark there is a multitude of fairly average buildings and enemy ground installations.

Enemy planes are nothing but big red boxes when they're off in the background, but look particularly impressive when they're zooming past the nose of your plane with machine guns blazing. Tanks and trucks look average at best, and are there just for an added extra to blow up. Sure, they might pelt you with bullets, but Joe can fix that up right away.

The entire game is played from a behind-the-plane angle except for when you are targetting an enemy fighter. By holding down the left trigger the camera keeps the enemy centre-screen and it's up to you to figure out how to align your plane to the enemy. While this mode is great for when the enemy is already in front of you, things can get confusing when targetting the guy on your tail, and can lead to many missions coming to an abrupt fiery end. Other things that are worthy of a mention are the billowing clouds of smoke that darken the sky and your vision if you try and navigate through one and the fact that bombs dropped don't seem to affect the ground surface at all. As mentioned before, graphics are a mixed bag.

With the numerous amounts of enemy planes filling up the skies, it's not just the field of view that can get cluttered. It seems that every enemy uses the same radio frequency as your squadron and that they all use English as their first language despite the many different races featured in the game.

You might want to know what they're saying the first 20 times, but you will be praying for an off switch to the radio only a few missions in. It is all too possible that you will hear the same radio broadcasts being made 80 - 100 times in the duration of this game, enough to make any gamer reach for the volume control, the only problem there being that every other sound in the game is done to perfection. The sound of planes and gunfire, the explosions and ricochet of rounds off aluminium are all replicated beautifully. It's a shame you won't hear any of it over the constant radio broadcasts.

Once you either tire of doing the same objectives mission after mission, or just go a little crazy over the incessant radio banter, you are going to find yourself taking this game online. This is where the majority of the fun will be had, and after taking a friend down after a 5 - 10 minute dogfight you might find you don't want to return this title quite yet, as there is quite a few decent multiplayer modes to explore, from your typical dogfight against a group of people to the squad based missions that will see you and a friend go head-to-head with Kamikaze Japanese pilots intent on leaving their flaming corpses on your carrier. If you feel brave enough you can even take a friend through the Story mode in co-op mode.