The hero glances to his right. Just ten feet away, one of his main engines erupts into a fireball, painting a smoke trail across the sky as far as the eye can see. Sensing this might be his last chance as fighter bullets pepper each wing, he heroically dives headlong towards the enemy truck convoy below – anything to stop their march across Europe. In the split-second before impact, he makes his peace with the world, thinking of children and loved ones as he braces for impact. Crash! Thwack! Crump! The joyous airman’s craft soars steadily skywards, barely audible over the sound of exploding German vehicles below. Welcome to the world of Blazing Angels.

Whilst mission scenarios such as the above occur from time to time, being behind the joystick of some of history’s greatest battle aircraft remains amusing enough, so the acerbic tone is perhaps a little over the top. It’s just the only thing that’s next-gen about Blazing Angels is the disc format it’s delivered on. Though linear mission structure might be acceptable in isolation, its combination with objectives that require repetition of identical manoeuvres removes the topping and sauce from our proverbial ice-cream. An otherwise quite enjoyable jaunt over London amidst an air raid is sullied, for example, by having to defend against squadrons of enemy bombers attacking Parliament, all arriving from the exact same co-ordinates. As far as we’re concerned, you can stuff historical accuracy if it means we have to spend hours flying in circles like one wing’s shorter than the other.

Visually it’s not exactly stunning, looking very much like Ubisoft couldn’t afford to pay more than a handful of art staff, instead choosing to let that small group create all the textures in some isolated corner, to later stretch over disappointingly set-squared boxes. One swift copying exercise later, say the developers, and we have a city. Incorrect – what we have are a bunch of structures that you can tell are clones from medium range interspersed with granddad’s train set trees and non-deforming, badly nourished anaemic grass.

Things become pleasantly action-packed out of the rigid single-player structure, as often happens, but the main crux of the argument is this: why pay full price for a game to show the PS3’s power only to end up with a 360 title dismissed as ordinary on its release some 12 months ago? Though this is rhetorical, we’ll answer it: there’s no point. There’s much better out there, sadly.

Dave Shaw