IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey Preview

30 Jul 2009 at 12:15:19 by

There's something about flight simulators and consoles that doesn't quite work.  Despite the genre being focused primarily at the PC market, or even the Mac market, the simulator balance is never quite right.  This doesn't mean there aren't good arcade flight games out there with simulator aspects, but it does mean those that are used to the anal micromanagement systems find it hard to find any depth in console "simulators".

Enter then IL-2 Sturmovik, the latest offering from 505 Games, and a revival of one of the best flight sims ever seen on the PC.  Any flight sim fan will know the precedent this game set when it came out on PC, with painfully accurate attention to detail in every aspect of the game.  Speaking to a pilot who owned a Yak and had flown the Sturmovik during the war, I was told that the flight sim was as accurate, unpredictable and as enjoyable as flying the real thing.  And this was before I was ever a games journalist.

It's this depth, however, which is the problem with all console sims, and the primary problem here is control systems, something I've banged on about time and time again.  It's making sure the balance is right, and engaging enough for casual players, but challenging enough for more hardcore players without the frustrations of the button maps.  Most flight sim players will have their joystick of choice, and will have spent hours programing their stick to play with their game of choice.

Take away the flight stick and the copious amount of buttons and you're left with a very basic control mechanism to fly quite a complicated aircraft.

But you see, this is the beauty of IL-2 on the console.  Because you're flying a WWII aircraft, you're not going to need to assign different buttons for the myriad of different functions that modern aircraft have.  And, bearing that in mind, flying the aircraft actually becomes a lot more exciting.  You are relying purely on the forces behind the flying, that is the thrust and lift of the aircraft.  And it's the aircraft we must talk about.

I've flown in the back of a Hurricane and in a Tiger Moth, as well as spent a lot of time with pilots that still own and fly Mustangs and Yaks.  I've grown up with military aircraft, modern day jets to WWI airplanes.   This may sound a little irrelevant, but just stay with me here.

A lot of the time when you're flying in a game, things like the cockpit or flight models just don't feel perfect; unless the game is a specific add-on to Microsoft Flight Simulator, or unless you're playing a dedicated flight sim game such as Falcon 4.0 or IL-2 on the PC.  This isn't the case in IL-2.  Not only are the cockpits as realistic as you can get, but they're not just a set of dials that are static.  In addition to this, the flight models of the aircraft are near perfect, as are the noises of the engines and the way the aircraft handles.  This might not be so true in the case of the Arcade settings, but when you fly in Realistic settings, or even Simulator settings, you really can feel the differences between the aircrafts' handling.

I'm going to be honest too, I didn't think, with the variety of aircraft on offer, they'd be any depth to the different aircraft, but I was wrong.  I was also somewhat annoyed when I discovered, at E3, you could fly a selection of aircraft from the Allied campaigns.  I felt this was a betrayal to the title, and if I'm honest I'm not so sure that the IL-2: Birds of Prey title is relevant.  That's not to say, however, it's not worthy of the title.  It's just a little misleading, as only around one sixth of the overall campaign is done in an Ilyushin.  And because 1C developed the original Ubisoft game, you know this game is in safe hands, so they're not going to bastardise a product that was recieved so well.

But you see, the game isn't just about the flight models and the levels of realism, which we'll get onto, but it's about the environment, the scenery, the skies in which you fly.  Not only do you feel you're involved in epic battles over some of the most intense battle zones during the war, with hoards of Axis aircraft flying at you in massive groups and familiar Nazi formations, but the scenery is something else.

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