Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of World War II

Going way back, the original Blazing Angels title was one of my first completions on the Xbox 360. I remember it being a relatively straight forward completion and a game with multiplayer without multiplayer achievements so when I saw there was a sequel, I jumped right on it. This was back in 2008 – it turns out that Blazing Angels 2 does have online multiplayer and some rather overzealous achievements to boot.

2008, and anything I played pre 2011 was done so without any consideration to whether I could actually complete the games I was playing (due to closed servers or not fun multiplayer, just to clarify) so after finishing the single player, I put this one back on the shelf for an indefinite amount of time... until 9 years later, someone else who bought the game came along and allowed me an avenue to actually get the remaining online achievements.

Blazing Angels 2 is a flight combat simulation game where you replay fictional missions from World War 2. The campaign involves flying different planes around and blowing stuff up and shooting stuff out of the sky.

Graphically I don’t think it’s held up too well against most modern titles but the flying controls are straight forward, it’s a simple game to play and the AI aren’t cheap so all in all, the single player is a solid 7 out of 10.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

There’s really no great shakes with the single player campaign. 19 achievements are gained by completing the main campaign missions.

Outside of this, there are achievements for doing certain things multiple times, obtaining Ace ratings, acquiring all technology and completing stunts (which is a collectible one as you have to find the stunts in the missions).

Outside of this, you also need to unlock all the planes and complete all secondary objectives, which is the real challenge of the single player campaign. This will most likely require a few mission replays to get but the game tells you what you need to do. It’s challenging but not beyond the average gamer with patience.

When I was playing without achievement guides, I also managed to completely miss one for getting three streaks of at least 15 kills. I replayed one campaign mission to do this after restarting the multiplayer... ah the multiplayer.

Multiplayer

So there were approximately zero players still playing Blazing Angels 2 in 2017. Not much of a surprise considering , not a lot of people bought the game and it’s nine years old. So I approached one of my gaming friends and we embarked on a quest to get this finished. There are 18 achievements total for multiplayer which encompass doing a variety of things across several different multiplayer modes.

The first mode is Skirmish which has three achievements attached to it. You and your partner(s) have to destroy all targets with a set amount of lives. There are six missions and you have to complete two of them to 100%, 3 to 50% and all of them to 25%. While doing this, you can also get the achievement for assisting your wingman 25 times.

There is an achievement for playing one match in each mode and another for getting kills in 15 different aircraft. This second one isn’t so bad because you can change aircraft after you die so when you are trading off kills, this one can be done over three games for the Early, Mid and Late time periods for which different planes are available. There is another ridiculous one for making 15 kills in a row without dying. I’m not sure how possible this would be in a real match.

Once all of these little ones are done, it only leaves three big things to do. You have to get 300 kills in adversarial game types, which is a bit steep when only playing with one other player. The bigger pain in the ass is getting the squad match wins which you have to do 50 times. There is a hosting issue with this one too where the host doesn’t seem to get any wins but I was abusing a quit out method to get these where your opponent, who is also the host, quits out after one kill.

Now, for the big one. Even after doing all of that you will have racked up maybe ten hours of online play. You will have two achievements remaining for getting 25 and 50 hours of online multiplayer under your belt. This would be ridiculous doing legitimately and I suppose it shows that the developers thought they had put together an enjoyable multiplayer experience. I’m not convinced but my gaming history doesn’t show a great deal of multiplayer accomplishment so who am I to say what’s good and what’s not.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Blazing Angels 2 was one of those completions where I breathed a sigh of relief to be done with it. It was rewarding but not enjoyable. Not a lot of people have seen this through either. I finished the game in June 2017, nearly ten years after release and I was only the 257^th person to complete it (taken from Trueachievements.com).  The single player is solid even if the looks don’t hold up well – the multiplayer is the only put off from an achievement hunter’s perspective.