IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey
From the green and yellow patchwork fields of Dover, to the sun-soaked coastal holidayspots of Italy and on to the grey, burning skies of Berlin, IL-2 Sturmovik’s vistas are both grand and beautiful. But there’s little time to stop and stare when you’ve a Messerschmitt spitting bullets up your tailpipe. In what promises to be console gaming’s most comprehensive recreation of the air battles of the Second World War, sightseeing is pretty far down the list of priorities.
Indeed, concentration, skill and nerve are just the first of the myriad skills you’ll need to bring to the table. Birds of Prey comes in three different difficulty levels. At the default ‘Arcade’ difficulty, it’s little more than a 1940s-themed Ace Combat. Enemy planes light up on a futuristic HUD and dizzying barrel rolls and loops in the air bring with them little danger of spiraling out of control and smashing into the ground below.
But scale the difficulty up to ‘Realistic’ or ‘Simulator’ and the experience moves far closer the sort of PC-based flight simulator package in which the series made its name. Here throttle and rudder must be adjusted with care and precision, and every dogfight becomes a deadly tussle in which bullets are just the first of your concerns. Bank too hard or try a high speed loop-de-loop and your character may black out; here wrestling the plane from a deadly spiral downwards is difficult work.
IL-2 Sturmovik plays out across five different theatres of war, most of which are over the eastern front. Missions are divided evenly between ground and air targets, some requiring you to shoot down a squadron of airborne fighters, others asking you to sink a fleet of battleships. With 20 core missions, the package offers a meaty campaign to work through featuring a story told through a mixture of archive footage and contemporary voiceovers delivered in character.
Beyond this there’s a plethora of single missions to be tackled, with a huge range of different parameters and win conditions and that’s before you even get to the copious online modes. It’s in this online component that IL-2 Sturmovik is no doubt hoping to build a strong community of players, and as every mode is open to both arcade-style players as well as the simulator hardcore, there’s something for all tastes and abilities.
If there’s any concern at this stage it’s that IL-2 Sturmovik’s strict period setting could preclude the awesome spectacle of games such as Ace Combat, which had you fighting off giant air battleships. Here missions must be sensible and, where possible, historically accurate. But that’s undoubtedly also one of the game’s strengths: allowing console games the rare chance to take part in some of history’s most intense and important sky battles.
