Developer: 1C:Maddox Games Publisher: UbiSoft and 1C (Russia)
Reviewed by Cat91on 12/17/01

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First Impressions:

Graphics:

Oleg Maddox's team has achieved the very last word in combat sim graphics: just look at the shots to the right. IL-2 is optimized for the latest generation of video cards, and those who have the processing power will see the best clouds in any sim before or since, as well as snow that looks real. Players will see trees - yes, Virginia, trees - that until you're literally right on top of them look like trees: the forests are some sort of layered bump-map that really looks fantastic. Honest-to-goodness 3D trees are also liberally sprinkled around in places where there is no forest. The buildings in the game are all 3D, and though they tend to pop up like one sees in Flanker 2.5, it's not as pronounced an effect unless you're in an external view as your aircraft approaches a town.

Cockpits for the 32 flyable aircraft are completely 3D, and modeled so precisely that each sub-variant within a type, such as the Messerschmitt Bf-109F2, G2 and several G6 variants, has its own individual cockpit. Bombs and rockets are painstakingly detailed, and the star of the game, the Ilyushin IL-2 Sturmovik (Stormer) ground-attack aircraft, has bomb bay doors that open to reveal the weapons inside (in the shots, they're FAB-100 hundred-kilo general purpose bombs). Tracers flash across the skies in every shade of color: American red, Russian green, and German blue are clearly visible, as is the white and yellow phosphorous from some types of cannon. Maddox's people researched this exhaustively, and as a result a pilot can often tell from a distance if the target aircraft is a friend or enemy by the color of the tracers! Explosions are sharp and colorful, and dirt clods fly up while rockets and bombs impact and flames burn. Napalm creates a flood of fire. Water moves and sprays. Rain slants through the early morning. Thunder booms, and lightning flashes. The sun looks like the sun: a simming first. I could go on for pages, but Banshee'd kill me if I did. ;) [Hey, if you have the patience to explain that many flight sim terms to me . . . ;) - Banshee] IL-2 has to be seen to be believed: the screenies don't do it justice.

There are a few anomalies. For example, when using certain types of bombs, such as the selection for 30 AO-10 ten-kg general purpose bombs, the bomb racks are replaced with some sort of green box that you can't see the bombs in until they fall out. The doors don't open in this application, and I thought that detracted from the beauty of the model. Also, ground vehicles' wheels and tracks don't turn, and though this is the first air combat I've ever seen other than Jane's WWII Fighters with people on the ground, there's still plenty of AA guns with no crew and no actual soldiers duking it out in ground positions. That's to save frame rates, I think. You'd probably need ten times the power of the hottest system out there today to have that type of detail, but I'd bet money that such is the future, after IL-2.

Also, if you look at the pilots of the aircraft, German as well as Russian, they are all men, with one exception, which I'll get to in a sec. For the Germans, I understand that. The only women pilots in the Third Reich were test pilots, and darn few of them. But the Russians had whole squadrons of women who flew in the war, and one of the principal types of aircraft they flew, the Yakovlev Yak-1b, is in the game. We're totally left out of the fighters. Additionally, there is no way to select your pilot's face when playing offline. You can do it online, but the offline options offer no such flexibility. If you're an offline player, you fly as a guy. Period. There's no excuse for that, and it excludes a large part of the simming public. We can do better than this, and, with the attention that Maddox is famous for giving the wants of his public, I hope to see this addressed.

Where women have been inserted into the game is as the crews of the Polikarpov U-2/Po-2 biplane, an AI-piloted bird. In the war, one of the women's air regiments were called the "Night Witches," or "Nachthexen," by the Germans. These regiments flew at night, often unescorted, against enemy ground targets and were very brave. The Cat applauds their inclusion as AI aircraft, however, there were others who flew for their country and were recognized by their foe as dangerous enemies.

In the interest of historical realism, IL-2 allows selection of certain historical ace AI pilots to be used in both quick missions and full missions. These AI pilots have enhanced AI routines to make them more realistic and challenging. This aspect of the game also gives online simmers the chance to meet up with some of the big air combat names from the east. One name is missing: Lidiia Vladimirovna Litvyak, known as "Lilya" to her comrades. She was the highest-scoring woman fighter pilot in history, with twelve known kills. Known as the "White Rose of Stalingrad" for the white lily painted on her Yak-1b, she was killed on an escort mission when eight German 109s took her on: according to online sources, she killed two before being shot down herself. She was posthumously awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union medal. Frankly, she ought to be represented: a sim that prides itself on historical realism shouldn't ignore the contributions of fighting women. Women flew the IL-2, both as pilots and air gunners. This ought to be selectable as a toggle switch, or at least easily hackable for women simmers out there. Earlier games such as Microprose's Falcon 4.0 and EA/Jane's F/A-18 ably addressed the inclusion of women. Sadly, IL-2 is a step backward.

Sound/Music:

IL-2 Sturmovik's sounds are awesome. Players can tell various aircraft weapons apart just by their sound! The Russian 20mm ShVAK cannon does not sound like the German 20mm MG-151/20 cannon; explosions sound muscular, and thunder sounds like thunder. Sturmovik fans can hear ricochet sounds, the buzzing of angry bees as tracer whizzes past your aircraft, and even the different engines of the aircraft. From the diesel-like power of the early IL-2 to the turbocharger of the Bf-109, the hums and whines and growls are all there.

The only weakness in aircraft sounds I saw was during flap lowering: there's a brief "zzzt" where I'd expected a hiss of hydraulics or a whiiiiine of machinery instead. Even in the latest patch, the Bf-109 has an irritating muted alarm sound in the background when its flaps are lowered: if that was present in the real aircraft, I bet a lot of ground crews disabled it!

The game's sound provides one place where Maddox and crew did not compound the problem of under-representing women: although we are present nowhere in the radio voices, at least the developer didn't commit the cardinal sin of forcing us to have a male radio voice during offline play. I had a detailed conversation with Oleg Maddox about this during development, and he stated that by the time the issue of female radio voices had come up, the sound engine was finalized and could not be altered. However, they planned to have a utility available with which the radio voices could be modified by the player. If that was done, I haven't seen it. We pretty much got left out again, here.

Gameplay:

This is why IL-2 Sturmovik is destined to be an instant classic. Oleg Maddox and his team hit it dead over the center field fence in this regard. The "Holy Grail" for combat sims has always been a game that would draw in hardcore, detail-loving simmers as well as casual weekend warriors. If IL-2 is not that sim, I don't know what is. There is something for everyone here. There is ground-pounding in the IL-2 and German Focke-Wulf FW-190 fighter, and loads of air-to-air combat. Players can try everything from early, hard-to-maneuver Russian fighters to superplanes like the Lavochkin La-5FN, which is acknowledged as one of the greatest piston fighters of all time. Bullets fly along ballistic trajectories. Real strategies, like losing your enemy in the sun or clouds, and actual basic fighter maneuvers taught to real pilots, have to be used to survive at the higher levels. Damage modeling is spectacular: a player might deal terrible structural damage to an enemy aircraft, only to watch that opponent stay in the game. It is possible to spray a rival with fire, only to see the aircraft nose over and crash with no observable damage.

The game installs easily and runs almost flawlessly on my machine, even though Windows 2000 is known to be unfriendly to games. Damage modeling is scalable: one can either be a giant killer, or peck away with weapons that do historical damage. The AI is also scalable, from novice pilots that anyone can learn against, up to aces that one veteran online simmer couldn't tell were AI when in a combined online game with both humans and AI. By the way, gunnery is realistic: there is no bubble around the enemy aircraft you can hit for a kill. Players have to put steel on target. That's hard, but it's fun.

The campaigns are non-dynamic, which has been a bone of considerable contention in the online community. However, they are branching (rather than strictly linear), and a simmer calling himself "Starshoy" has created an automatic campaign generator that uses the game's fully-featured mission editor to build campaigns automatically. This utility, approved by Oleg Maddox, is available at SimHQ.com and it's a must-have.

The other utility that's a must-have, if you're into total historical realism, is a little harder to find. If you look at the FW-190 and Junkers Ju-87 "Stuka" shots at right you'll see that their tails sport the hakenkreuz, the swastika that was the symbol of the Third Reich. In several countries, this symbol has been banned for being representative of the ultra-right, and they believe that its use in games can be seen as extending recognition to unspeakable hate and horror. Accordingly, 1C:Maddox Games agreed to remove all the graphics relating to this from the German aircraft files, in copies of the game shipping outside the Russian Federation. Simmers howled: World War II German aircraft just don't look right without their historical livery. We want to see them as they were, without sanitizing real history. It was inevitable that someone would figure out how to put the swastika back: they did so by taking the images from the Russian version and using a utility to put them into the game while it was running. You can get that program at SimHQ.com also, but you have to look in the IL-2 forum.

Enjoyment:

I love it; I've flown nothing else for almost a year now. Through the beta program and back to the pre-beta last year, I've been booting up dogfights in particular. I'm rotten at it, but, geez, it's fun. Remember that scene from Star Wars where Darth Vader was saying "The Force is strong in this one," about Luke? You'll say that a lot, I promise you.

Multiplayer:

Completely seamless. Kali, Hyperlobby, Ubi.com, and IL-2 itself all have ways to use it. Custom skins, for pilots as well as planes, can be seen online, and the game even has a Roger Wilco-like voice chat utility. This is the new standard in multiplayer, supporting classic dogfighting as well as cooperative missions built in the mission editor. It allows up to 32 players, as well. My hat's off to Maddox for getting multiplayer right in a classic sim at last.

Overall Impression:

IL-2 Sturmovik is a combat flight sim for the ages. It will be years before anyone comes close, though I know Carl Norman and Matt Wagner are trying with Lock On: Modern Air Combat, another UbiSoft title. Carl, Matt, you've got a long row to hoe to beat Oleg at this game, and I hope you do it. The modern simming community needs an IL-2, and I can't think of anyone better placed to turn one out.

Marketing Efforts Towards Women:

I'm scratching my head over this one. UbiSoft and the Maddox team had a golden opportunity to woo more women into combat simming with this title. There is a huge untapped market of women out there who play computer games, and lots of us are combat simmers. At least three high profile women simmers were on the beta team, and all of us were constantly telling Oleg what women simmers want out of these games.

More women fly WWII sims than any other genre, and the Russian front is the one and only WWII front where women really flew combat aircraft in combat! It was a tailor-made opportunity for inclusiveness, and they didn't rise to the occasion. I'm mystified as to how this happened: Falcon 4.0 included us in as far back as 1997, and EA/Janes did it in 1998. I'd bet cash that Matt Wagner, a former EA employee and one of F/A-18's designers, won't make this mistake in Lock On.

Including the "Nachthexen" as AI was great, Oleg, but the player doesn't have the ability to fly the Po-2! Again, the female player got left out of a cutting-edge combat simulation. That's sad, and a poor marketing choice in a game that is destined to be the classic combat sim of the early 21st century. That being said, it's worth the time and money to buy and to fly, regardless. Women, fly this sim, and let UbiSoft and Oleg Maddox know how you fee: the official site is here for your perusal. IL-2 will have a successor. Let's see if we can get women well-represented for a change.