Among the hard-to-please PC gaming flight-sim crowd, IL-2 Sturmovik is one of the few franchises to get even the most serious of historical air buffs nodding their heads in admiration. The original game was our pick for GameSpy's Simulation of the Year Award in 2001, and the follow-up games, for the most part, kept the license's sterling reputation in one piece.
But is the console community ready for a serious flight simulator? 1C thinks so, and IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey represents the company's effort to bring the intensely detailed combat of the IL-2 series to the Xbox 360 and PS3. Three modes of play are available: Arcade, Realistic and Simulator, which run the gamut from casual play to all the hardcore nitty-grittyness that made the original sim famous.
Graphically we liked what we saw. Aside from the loving exactness with which the airplanes were rendered -- complete with wear and tear in the cockpit -- the exterior environments were breathtaking. The terrain below was alive with intersecting fields, roads, and tiny towns. Shimmering ribbons of rivers wended through the countryside, sometimes obscured by thick forest, sometimes spanned by elaborate bridges.
When the bullets started flying the eye candy was nearly as intense as the action. Tracer rounds tore across the sky. Tailfins shredded. Whining engines sputtered and trailed streaks of dark black smoke across the horizon. It looked like IL-2 was going all out to make sure to capture the attention of more than just hardcore simulation fans.
Representatives from 1C played the demo for us mostly in Arcade mode. When we insisted that they try it out in full-on simulation, they hesitated and finally said they probably wouldn't be able to stay alive very long. As the game started up we could see why: in Simulation mode, you've got no heads-up display, no radar, and no information about your plane aside from what you can see out of the cockpit or on the gauges below. Just spotting enemy planes is a challenge, much less keeping them in your sights with the real aircraft physics and the threat of blacking out if you pull too many Gs. We particularly enjoyed how the cockpit swayed as we flew, simulating how we were getting thrown from one side to another during intense turns.
The full game will have four campaigns ranging from the Battle of Britain to dogfighting in the skies above Stalingrad, with a mix of convoy missions, aerial combat, and ground target bombing. It's hard to say if the console community will embrace IL-2 as much as the PC simulation community did, but the game was looking good at Leipzig.
