IL-2 Sturmovik (PC)
I've been a long time fan of all WWII airplanes and dogfighting. It's REALLY hard to find ANY dogfighting games availalble, therefore any "good" ones are even tougher to find. I ranked this game as "good" instead of "excellent", but let me explain in a little more detail. The game does a pretty good job in the visual arena; I've got an older box (P4 3.2Ghz,1Gb,GeForce 7600GT card) and it runs without a hitch. The problems I have are a little more with the "feel" of the game. 1st, I know the Sturmovik is a Russian plane-that's a big "duh", and realism is great and stuff,but do the designers have to be so "faithful to realism" that they code all the gauges and dials in Cyrillic ??? Most of the controls are instinctive and you can pick them up w/o a hitch, but some of the planes are just downright STRANGE in terms of control gauge layouts. When you can't read the dials, you've taken "reaslism" just a little too far IMO.
Controlling the aircraft is a little bigger of a gripe for me. I'm using a Logitech Extreme3DPro stick w/ no "rudder pedals". This is where it gets frustrating... the "twist" is alwasys set for your rudder control and in flight, this causes real problems in terms of control b/c your wrist will "twist" naturally when you perform just about ANY stick movements; I finally had to completely disable this and TRY to set the rudder ctrl onto the keyboard - this isn't ideal either, but it's a little better. Setting the rudder controls is just "odd" anyways (there's Left,Right, Full Left, Full Right, and Center; what's the differences? maybe you could tell me b/c they all seem to act either strangely or not at all. In general, the "flight" realism is just slightly off and it makes for a frustrating learning curve.
The "missions": The missions can be seriously tough with a steep learning curve! Not only do you have to fly the plane from course point to course point (thank GOD for the time-warp feature!) until you get a message saying MISSION FAILURE --- as to WHY you failed, good luck figuring that out... you were probably supposed to perform some odd "cover-fire" for something you can't even see or drop a bomb on a bridge (you'll get to try that one a few hundred times until luck finally prevails....)
Just plain old Buttkicking: you can set up the game to pit you or your squad (sometimes almost "intelligent") against as many as 16 opponents. To me, this is where the game gets just plain old fashioned FUN! You have ALOT of great planes to choose from, all with different flight trims and (again, if "realism" is your "altar of gaming") you can set it for realistic ammo levels, spins, stalls, blackouts/redouts, blah... until it WILL really test your abilities!!! My favorites are the quick and dirty "knife-fight" scenarios with my 1 plane against 8 opponents (2 elements of 4 planes), unlimited ammo, but leaving everything else alone.
IL-2 is a really fun game to practice your skills on, but sometimes it can REALLY irritate you b/c of the control settings. I still think it's "good" just because it's NOT an arcade level peice of trash, but it's not so detailed where you'd better crack open your "FAA Basic Flight Manual" to have a good time. But even so, prepare to be at least a little frustrated - the learning curve is still steep!Read full review
