Korea. IL-2 Series

not worth £70, more like £12 no actually it should be maximum £3 and thats pushing it

Congratulations on the release, 1C. I've been tracking the game for a long long while. This is my favorite era of aerial warfare with some of my favorite planes, so my opinions are a bit biased in favor of the game, but I'll try to be as impartial as I can with the details. Having played a good little bit, here's my take: The Good: - Visual fidelity for both air and ground assets is incredible. The effects look great, physics are awesome, very visually captivating experience. - The damage modeling is spectacular. Getting hits, while challenging, is incredibly rewarding. Guns feel lethal, and higher caliber cannons are devastating as they should be. Niche individual systems can be disabled or destroyed due to aircraft stress or incoming damage. This is one of, if not the most, impressive parts of this game. - The map size is immense, a 1:1 Korea with a multitude of interesting locations, varied water levels due to dams, and beautiful scenery. It's clear to me that the map designers in particular have a deep respect and love for this game and time period. - The Career mode gives you both the option to involve yourself in the fights, or take a back seat and just run the fighter squadron. If they continue to iterate and improve the campaign, I foresee this being a phenomenal experience, but what's here is good enough to keep my attention. - The game has tools for making missions, providing the community the ability to iterate on the gameplay in their own way, honestly a must have. GB had these as well, it's a good thing to have. - G-Lock and pilot fatigue, a rare thing to have to consider as a part of gameplay in most sims, provides interesting balance between the fast jets and slower props. - Helpers are present for people who want to just fly the plane and not deal with managing the engine, but it's present for those that do. - The museum and in-game guides are a nice way to learn about the aircraft and its systems. While not as flashy, it sure beats having to go find a community made guide to figure out how to fly the damn thing. Huge kudos to the folks that worked on this, your efforts in preserving history are seen and appreciated. - Plane designation customization is a nice touch, it's very nice to quickly find your wingman when you're waiting on the ramp, not having to guess which aircraft is theirs. - Being able to exit and enter the aircraft is very cool, the animations are overall pretty well done, I just wish there was more of a point in doing so. - In-map navigation tools are solid. These would be even better if you could share them between players for flight planning. - The airfields are more than just a flat surface. The takeoff and landing experience in this game has felt better than any other combat flight sim I've played, as far as I can remember. - The UI interface for controlling your aircraft, while not a clickable cockpit, is very friendly for those players with limited stick space or who have a hard time remembering key combinations. Great addition. The Bad: - The experience of the career mode does not feel particularly dynamic. IL-2 1946 is still the staple in this series for a dynamic campaign in my opinion, but I hope they continue to improve it. This could be an issue of experience, however, so give it a good try and form your own opinion. - The flight models are good enough, but there's some differences in the way this game controls compared to other flight sims. The community is currently hunting down a-historic issues to present to the developers, so hopefully this improves with time. - The balance greatly favors the MiG-15bis. Some generally a-historic additions are made as optional, such as a g-suit for the MiG-15, which never found use in Korea or 150 octane fuel for the P-51D which is much the same. Thankfully, community servers are able to disable these if desired. - The plane matchups for the standard edition leaves a lot of gaps - F-80C, F-86A, and F-51D vs MiG-15bis, Yak-9P, and IL-10. Much of the war is un-represented here, but I presume we'll see some additions in that regard eventually. - B-29 and Tu-2 are not flyable. It would be quite awesome to see these come as flyable options. - In a dive, the F-86A becomes tissue paper and falls apart very easily when pulling on the stick. This makes the MiG-15 and F-86 matchup much more favorable towards the MiG in my opinion, so it doesn't feel like as close of a matchup as it should. The wing slats still pop out on the F-86 at higher speeds, so it just dumps energy like crazy. Perhaps this is a skill issue, but having played with matchup in a few other games, this one does not end up feeling as close as I would imagine it. - The game is fairly well optimized in most respects, but I can occasionally experience hitching in singleplayer missions with low intensity fights, and it feels like my PC starts to chug on higher intensity missions. Multiplayer does not have these same issues, thankfully. - Pilot head direction is not shown in the 3rd person model for other player's aircraft, at least from what I've seen in multiplayer. I really enjoy the little extra immersion of seeing your wingman look around or look at you, so I was a bit saddened to not see this. - No mass apply buttons for aircraft skins in the career mode, so you'll be forced to customize each aircraft individually if you want to have skins on your squadron's planes. Takes a lot of time to do so, would be nice to not have to do that. - The spoken dialogue in the radio is very rough, but that's not a unique issue for this series. The Ugly: - Helicopters are not present in any way, player or AI - I understand helicopters are incredibly complex to model, but this is their debut war and it feels wrong to ignore them. I hope they change their mind on this down the road. - The enemy aircraft AI is terribly bad. Multiple times, I've gone into the Sabre to fight the MiG in the exam mode, and it just flies into the ground after about 2 minutes of just staying 2km+ away from me. The lazy turn is deeply present. - Friendly aircraft AI is equally terrible, leading a flight in the career mode and reversing a turn has a high chance of causing collisions in the flight when using a higher number of aircraft. 1946 and GB felt better in this regard. A secondary note, the pricing of this game is a point of contention for a lot of people. I do think the game is worth the price tag, because of what it offers compared to every other single game out there. Having paid the same value, a couple times, for planes in DCS - I think the overall experience presented here is better. The collector planes though, I think they're a bit high on the pricing, especially since they don't offer any real unique gameplay. My Takeaway: Give it a good try, the multiplayer is fun, the AI is terrible. If the AI doesn't improve, then I'd steer clear if you're interested in singleplayer exclusively. For now, I'll recommend it because I think the bones are present enough that it can improve and I genuinely want them to succeed.