IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 PC Review
What I Liked:
1. Hands down the best World War 2 combat flight simulator available.
2. Literally a couple hundred different aircraft and their variants to fly and fight against. Greatest selection of flyable aircraft in any WW2 flight simulator.
3. Great graphics, but they are starting to show their age.
4. Fantastic full mission builder included that lets you design your own missions both for single player and multi player games.
5. Loads of campaigns to fly, and multi player options let you do both competitive missions and Co-Op.
6. You can save replays of missions. These replays can be used to make machinima movies.
7. Option for using custom aircraft skins.
8. Variable difficulty settings. Play it as real as it gets, or tone it down for an easier flight.
What I Didn’t Like:
1. Campaign missions start you (realistically) far away from the target. No option to start closer to the target. So you either have to set the autopilot and accelerate time for a few minutes, or fly the long distance in real-time. Your autopilot will sometimes fly you into terrain during time skips.
2. AI can seem pretty stupid. Aircraft will sometimes fly right into terrain, even in straight and level flight. I’ve seen AI aircraft seemingly refuse to engage targets right in front of them.
3. Replay system can be buggy, and replays saved on previous version numbers won’t work.
4. No flyable torpedo bombers. (this is practically a tragedy for the Pacific Fighters part of the game)
Yay: An amazing flight simulator that has redefined the benchmark for combat flight sims. +1
Gay: Historically accurate German and Finnish markings (swastikas) are not available on the aircraft without the use of a 3rd party “patch” due to political correctness. There are laws in some countries that ban the use of swastikas even in products such as this game, which is otherwise very true to history. I’m not subtracting a point for this, because it’s not the game designers’ fault.
Final BS Rating: +5 FUCKIN’ BADASS!
