Blazing Angels 2

Flight combat: fun yet boring. Worth: $10
based on the 360 demo: August 2007

Nothing is wrong with this game, but I have a problem with this entire genre. Flight combat can be a good _part_ of an action game, but on it's own it's too limited. Fly here, shoot that. Fly there, shoot this. Even Crimson Skies got boring after a while, and that game had way more imagination than BA2. Ask yourself how much fun Halo would be if you _only_ flew the Banshee.

Back In My Day: years ago Rebar and I played a Mac game called "Hellcats Over The Pacific" that totally sucked until we found some great cheat codes. Then we started bombing islands in half. Hundreds of bombs and rockets in the air at once. Great fun. We played it that way for months.

The only flight game I really liked was called Red Baron (for Mac). It had a good sense of history because you play the entire war. You start with lousy 1914 planes doing reconaissance. By the end, you're in a Fokker Triplane or the tricky Sopwith Camel wiping out a sky full of opponents.