With a name like Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII, this Xbox 360 sure sounds like a combat flight simulation set in the 40's, but controls are so wonky that it plays more like a flying bathtub simulation with a really loose yoke. Actually, a loose-yoked bathtub with guns. Or sometimes a loose-yoked bathtub with just a reconnaissance camera and a whole lot of sand on the screen that's presumably trying to convey just how diverse and challenging the combat pilots had it back in the day of true grit and limited technology (there's no heads-up radar, either; just you looking at the ass end of your plane with a dizzying toggle option of looking at the enemy and losing all sense of spacial relationship between them and your ass), but all you really end up feeling is the need for a bath -- and the next level where you get to shoot stuff. Speaking of which, there's little flow to the game, with one level of harsh difficulty followed, maybe, by one of ridiculous ease.

It also doesn't help that the constant chatter from both your wingman and the enemy is terrible; helpful once and repetitive thereafter, usually completely lacking in context, sometimes with badly caricaturized German accents and sometimes plainly insulting Japanese accents with rent-a-voice actors reading off a generic script with exactly three lines of dialogue to choose from -- sometimes, that is, when it doesn't sound like a Japansese pilot with Tourettes try to speak English with a bad German accent. It's ultra distracting and though you can turn them off, doing so will also turn off the rare quip of key information, forcing you to read it the subtitles (yellow ones are key), which takes the "immersiveness" out of it.

Also, you can't customize the controller to take the bathtub out of your plane, give it some snap roll control somewhere other than the right thumbstick so it doesn't get flummoxed by the irrevocably-linked throttle, brake and secondary fire trigger (all with the same stick) and the dopey left-stick/yoke, where left means lazy-left-banking turn unless you're rolling and maybe braking and wistful thinking about let a missile loose, in which case it means lazy-left-plummet. Sure, you get used to it, but you're not getting used to flying. Just airborne bath-tubbing.

But it's not all bad. It looks pretty swank in the high-def way of X360, and it does offer many moments of impossible satisfaction, like taking out an entire squadron of enemy bombers in one pass of the bathtub. But to really enjoy that, you'll need to first complete the mandatory campaign stuff, or parts of it, at least, before you can freestyle and access the select fun stuff, and that can be as fun as cleaning the bathtub.