Ubisoft's Blazing Angels: The series
Introduction:
The
'Blazing Angels' franchise is a series of flight simulator/air war games developed by Ubisoft France, but written by Ubisoft's subsidiary in the Romanian capitol of Bukarest.
The first game, simply called "Blazing Angels" was released in 2007 for the Nintendo WII. Over the next 8 years five more installments followed, however the series success was tied to the success of the Nintendo consoles and as Nintendo struggled past 2012 to position its Wii-U against a growing mobile game market, the franchise struggled as well and only now, with the Nintendo Switch regaining a decent market share, do the last three titles of the Franchise get the following they deserved.
The Series:
- Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII,
- Ubisoft Bukarest Nintendo Wii,2007
- Blazing Angels: the Forgotten Missions,
- Ubisoft Bukarest Nintendo Wii,2009
- Blazing Angels: Normandie Niémen,
- Ubisoft Bukarest Nintendo Wii,2012 Wii-U,2013
- Blazing Angels: Harrie's War,
- Ubisoft Bukarest Nintendo Wii 2013, Wii-U, 2014, re-released for Nintendo Switch 2018
- Blazing Angels: Young Eagles,
- Ubisoft Bukarest Nintendo Wii and Wii-U, 2015, planned re-released for Nintendo Switch 2019
- Blazing Angels: Les missions Morane / The Morane Missions
- Ubisoft Bukarest Nintendo Wii-U, 2015, re-released for Nintendo Switch 2018
The original Blazing Angels and the forgotten Missions:
As in OTL, "
Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII" appeared in late 2007 as a flying game for the Nintendo Wii. Although not a blockbuster, it had a solid fan base, especially since it was one of the few halfway realistic combat flight simulators for the Wii and one of the better ones in its class. In particular Ubisoft Bukarest gained respect for its realism. Not only were the aircraft realistically modeled and at least halfway consistent in its handling, speeds and firepower to their real life counterparts, the scenery itself, although not remarkable by 2007 standards and outright crude by today's expectations, still manages to give the overall look and feel of the different battlefields and more importantly the different European regions the missions play in. The soundtrack is remarkable in that even for being the enemies, the German speak not only correct German but actual WWII army slang. I do not know Japanese so I don't know how (historically) accurate the voices of the Japanese are, but the fact that they DO speak Japanese is remarkable even today. And as for English: The American pilots speak US English, the RAF pilots speak British English and the various infantry radiomen in the Africa campaign speak, depending on the regiment with either a Cockney, Scottish or even Australian accent.
The story itself is pretty straightforward: the unnamed player character is a member of the RAF 'angel Squadron' made up of American volunteers. As such, after a quick intro on a Scottish training base, he flies missions over Dunkirk, defends London during the Blitz and helps out Montgomery in Africa. After that he and his team mates are re-assigned with the US air force and sent as flight instructors to Hawaii. They arrive just in time for the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. Subsequently they fight in the Corral Sea, at Midway, over Guagelcanal and over Rabaul before being sent back to Europe to participate in the landings in Normandie, the liberation of Paris, the battle of the Bulge and finally the taking of Berlin. There are three teammates of the player, named Tom, Frank and Joe but like the main character they are never shown in person. They only manifest themselves as airplanes flying next to yours and as voices over the intercom. Each has his special abilities and later in the game a good deal of tactical play revolves around you as the squadron leader having to command and deploy them.
The planes range from the early 1940's Gloster Gladiator and Brewster Buffalo to the latest model Hawker Fury and North American Mustang on the allied side to the complete gauntlet of Messerschmitt, Focke-Wulfs, Zeros and Hayabusa's on the axis side, along with non-playable Heinkel bombers, Aichi dive-bombers and Stukas. In an arcade mode, you can play all of the fighters, axis and allies and also some extras like the Me.163 and the Douglas Skyraider. Still, missing is the P.38 Lightning- for some reason replaced by the p.82 Twin Mustang- and the F4F, F6F and F4U navy fighters. Most notably with none of the chapters playing in the Russia campaign, there are no Mig, Yak and Lavochkin fighters to play.
The game was followed in 2009 by "Blazing Angels: the Forgotten Missions" which were practically a new set of missions for mostly the already existing planes and scenery leading up to a boss fight with an armored zeppelin. Truely, the game had some new planes such as the De Havilland Vampire jet fighter, but the story was as thin as Saran wrap and it was obvious that the game was just a quick money grab built on leftover code from the original. The public quickly saw through this scheme and sales were accordingly. OTL, this was the end of the 'Blazing Angels' franchise.
but what if it had continued?
Normandie Niémen, the reboot:
- See the separate post to appear soon in this forum
Harrie's War and Young Eagles:
- See the separate post to appear soon in this forum
The Morane Missions:
- See the separate post to appear soon in this forum
Past 2015:
Already in 2011, while Ubisoft was writing the Balzing Angels reboot "
Normandie-Niémen", Nintendo was phasing out the WII console and developing its successor, the Wii-U. The Wii-U launched in November of 2012, six months after the release of "
Normandie Niémen" while Ubisoft was already developing "
Harrie's War". Consequently, "
Harrie's War" was updated to run on the Wii-U as soon as it was released and a Wii-U version of it was available a mere three months after the original. "
Young Eagles", the 'Allied version' of "
Harrie's War" was written for both the original Wii as well as the Wii-U and released for both platforms on the same time. However both '
Harrie's War" and "
Young Eagles" were still written to be played strictly wit the Wii controllers and did not use any of the special features of the Wii-U's touchscreen. This and the fact that the Wii-U was by all means a commercial flop resulted in the second decline of the series and although the last part of the Blazing Angels Franchise, "
The Morane Missions" masterfully took advantage of the new possibilities of the Wii-U hardware, it suffered from the poor reception of the Wii-U console. Until 2018, its sales did not even surpass those from the original 2007 Blazing angels.
"The Morane Missions" did however get critical response from its players that would move both end and continue the franchise: For a while Ubisoft was toying wit the idea of releasing Young Eagles as a massive multiplayer platform on PC, at one time even considering a mobile phone version of it, when Nintendo visited their Paris headquarters with a bold proposal: Nintendo would release a completely new console: the Switch and remembering that one of the main reasons for the failure of the Wii-U was the lack of good titles in its critical first year, it was now offering Ubisoft all their support to make a new Blazing Angels game written specifically for the Switch. Ubisoft was willing, however feeling that it had the WWII flying game genre already milked dry, came with another proposal: Instead of 'Flying Angels', it would continue the Bob Morane storyline with a game featuring Morane in the early post-war years. And as in the last three titles players loved the flying but were just as well, and sometimes even more, fanatic about the occasional car driving or man-to-man fighting scenes, the new game would feature a mix of equal parts of flying, driving various vehicles, combat and spying. The resulting game: "Bob Morane 1947" was released in December 2017 upon the launch of the Nintendo Switch as one of the initial games for the console. It quickly outsold all the Ubisoft games for the Wii-U. Rumors of a successor game, available late 2019, have since been confirmed. The titles "Bob Morane 1951" or "Bob Morane: The Yellow Shadow" have been rumored but an official announcement on the part of Ubisoft is still to come.
In the meantime, Ubisoft has re-released "
Blazing angels: The Morane Missions" for the Switch and with it now having a decent game console to support it, the game finally gets its due, five years after its initial launch. In the year since, sales from "The Morane Missions" on Switch have surpassed those on the Wii-U for the last three years making it the most grossing '
Blazing Angels' title.
In the follow-up, Ubisoft also re-released "
Harrie's War" for the Switch with "
Young Eagles" to follow soon. However, after that, Ubisoft plans to concentrate strictly on the
Bob Morane franchise. No new "Blazing Angels" titles are expected.