Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII sees you take on the role of an American pilot based overseas and starts out with the normal flow of getting know your capabilities. It also sees the introduction of Joe, a rookie wingman of the second wing, and then shortly followed by Tom, wingman of the first wing and Frank, leader of the second wing.

As the game continues, it flows into a story mode and dives into their lives a bit, which at times gets cheesy with the whole coming from a small town thing… with that said though it does mix it up a bit, giving you a rundown and snippets of the events leading up to each mission. This gives missions a bit more purpose than if you were dumped from one place to the other with no explanation.

The missions are a combination of both going on the defensive, protecting ground troops to full on attacks, bombing enemy bases and ships. The action can get intense with enemies always on your tail and their ground troops firing at every opportunity.

Sometimes it seems never ending with the massive amount of air attacks being thrown at you. Your success hinges on how you use Joe, Frank and Tom. Each has special abilities that you can control with simple commands using the D-pad: Joe is your mid-air repairs man; Tom is your shield and deflects the attention his way as you try and hit objectives; and finally Frank, who on your command will start mass attacking with pinpoint accuracy. All three are pretty handy to have by your side, but the mid-air repairs take away the need to try to hold your own through am entire mission.

But you don't have to call on Joe - once you get a handle on the controls you can pull off some pretty sleek moves, which will see you out of trouble most of the time. Flying is pretty straightforward with the left analogue stick controlling turns and the right your speed. You can pull off virtually anything since as you can't crash from collisions. The only real obstacles are enemy fire and the ground.

The controls default to the use of the analogue stick, but the one configuration of interest is the use of Sony's Sixaxis tilt control. This is a true test, with the plane being controlled through tilt sensors. At first it feels a bit odd titling the control side to side, and you feel like a novice gamer who turns your whole body as if you were the plane. It takes a bit of time getting use to but is worth the effort.

Smooth handling is what it is suited for, with the plane responding well to smooth transitions from side to side. But as the game throws so many airborne attacks at you, you can't help but jerk the control from one side to the other to avoid ground obstacles. It doesn't really like quick movements, so if you're heading for a collision with the ground then don't hold your breath.

For a next generation game the graphics are not great, but they're not bad either. Across some missions, London for example, graphics are well crafted and have that old school look - you can fly close in to see how much detail has gone into the game. On the other hand some places are pretty bland where things just look like blotches on canvas. To be fair though, this is a flight game and the graphics of planes going down in smoke, bombs going off and a hail of bullets during air battles are pretty good. It would have been nice to see the planes in a little more detail, though. You get to see what planes are on offer but you don't really get to appreciate the plane in detail. However, you can pretty much get the job done with just a Spitfire - the rest is just surplus.