Farewell Blazing Angels...

Bit the bullet last week and got shot of Blazing Angels, the pisspoor WWII shooter that I foolishly bundled in with my initial Xbox purchase. What a total waste of time, a particular slap in the face given the vast superiority of similarly themed Secret Weapons Over Normandy - something I've harped on about in the past.

What made it so bad was its sheer shallow mediocrity - it was just dull. The graphics were pretty but nothing special, and the one gimmick of notional control over a squadron of differently skilled wingmen was poorly implemented and utterly superfluous. This all came to a head in one of the last missions I played where you are set the task of flying through a zero visibility sandstorm following radio signals for directions. Cue half an hour of random zooming around a uniformly beige environment with only poorly acted and scripted radio transmissions as a (mostly useless) guide. What pap.

Have to say the replacement isn't going to blow anyone's mind, though decent xbox titles are still pretty thin on the ground. I bought The Outfit mainly for its multiplayer component, which I played via the Xbox Live demo (so far two of my five games were bought off the back of downloaded demos - canny Microsoft, very canny). The single-player bit is rather limp, and the game suffers from the common syndrome of an interesting idea, sketchily implemented. In this case the idea of matching a RTS building and troop deployment element with an FPS environment has its moments (nothing like slapping a 50 cal machine gun nest right in the path of a Nazi stormtrooper charge) but falls a bit flat as the overall design doesn't match the initial inspiration. There is little potential for any real strategy - for instance one mission requires the capture of a tank, but the map doesn't allow for any flanking movement, requiring a head-on charge and hoping for some luck. Similarly squad command is painfully limited and AI of your support troops is variable in the extreme.

As I said, multiplayer was the key motivating factor in this purchase but I've yet to give the full version a road test. Could be we have a candidate for early return to the mighty CEX.