Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII / x3daudio1_0.dll fix

Last week I downloaded two pretty exciting demos, Tomb Raider: Legend and Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII. I played Legends first, but rather ironically, I’m reviewing Blazing Angels first. Oh well.

I planned to play Blazing Angels first, but ran into severe problems trying to get my Xbox 360 Controller to work. Ultimately, I turned to ControlMK only to find I couldn’t quite get my head around how to configure it.

For those not aware, ControlMK basically just maps controller functions to specific keyboard or mouse actions. So theoretically, you could do anything in windows using your controller (until you ran out of buttons).

When I eventually figured out how to create a profile for Blazing Angels, I decided to write the ControlMK Guide to help anyone else who was struggling.

I also had an error ‘x3daudio1_0.dll was not found’. This just means that you need to install directx 9.0c (which is included with the download). If this doesn’t resolve your error, please leave a comment with the details and I’ll try and find a solution.

Anyway, I should focus on the actual game, given that I eventually managed to play it.

I downloaded it from my friends at jucaushii.ro. I’m downloading all my stuff from those guys these days because they have pretty fast restartable servers. What that means is that I can manage my downloads so that I don’t download too much data. I try to keep it down to less than 500mb per day, so often have to split the larger downloads across days.

Blazing Angels is pretty much just another combat flight simulator, focussed on the WWII style aircraft. I have almost no experience with this genre, so can give pretty limited comments.

The graphics were great, especially when close to the ground flying over villages, Dunkirk and London. I didn’t manage to take any screenshots, but these can be sourced from gamespot.

The content provided in the demo seemed extremely generous. It could have ended after the tutorial (I’ve played demos that did) or very easily could have ended after the evacuation of Dunkirk, but didn’t. I don’t even know for sure it ended after London, since I lost interest in the game at this point. Even if it did, it still provided a huge amount of gameplay, possibly too much.

One disadvantage of the demo (which seems to be common for demos) is that you lose all your progress when you leave the game. What this means is that if you want to keep playing the demo, you better get pretty good at the tutorial level (which while enjoyable the first time, progressively gets less enjoyable).

Once I got the controller working, it was pretty cool, with fairly realistic flight physics and logical force feedback. The whole experience was pretty enjoyable, it was nice to get into a game that ordinarily, I would never have thought about purchasing.

I’m still not going to, but it could prove successful if priced and marketed correctly. Seems like a solid, well made game, so probably deserves 7/10.