It also scales down for beginners and more casual players. This important aural cue is far more intuitive than any gauge or readout, and it works wonders for conveying the feel of flight in World War II-era aircraft.įlight sim fans are notoriously fussy about realism, but IL-2 should give them little cause to complain. You can hear an impending stall as your plane's frame goes from creaking to rattling. The metallic creaking and thrumming of these planes in motion is even more impressive. IL-2 also features some wonderfully subtle touches, like the sound of bullets whistling by or ricocheting off your fuselage. You can even tune to the enemy frequency to hear your victims' mayday calls. You may not like having to look up at the top of your screen to read the subtitles, but you'll eventually learn to distinguish mission-specific information from flavor messages. The cockpit chatter is convincing and heartfelt, partly because it's all spoken in German or Russian. It features distinctive engine sounds, hearty gunfire, thudding flak, and the Doppler zoom of a plane roaring past your canopy. With graphics as sharp as IL-2's, this latter feature is a deceptively addictive time sink. You can record your missions to watch them after the fact or to assemble them as cinematic replays from different perspectives. With variable zoom levels available, you can effectively stick your head up to the sights and fire at your target as if you were shooting footage with a gun camera. Good-looking explosions and fire are a dime a dozen in games these days, and IL-2 is no exception. Larger-caliber cannons and rockets leave sharp smoke trails, while dogfights at higher altitudes leave lazy twisting coils of contrails.
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IL-2 has a realistic tracer effect with occasional illuminated rounds for machine guns. When the shooting starts, the graphics really take off. This is the sort of sim in which you can enjoy just watching the landing gear extend and retract. Your pilot's head even turns to look at his target. The aircraft models are superbly detailed, from chipped paint to moving control surfaces, down to every flap and leading edge slat. Water has a rippled translucent look, and surf even laps at the shore. To create forests, IL-2 uses a clever trick with layered bitmaps that give the illusion of depth and multiple trees-it's a bold new effect that pays off much better than mere forest textures with fake shadows along one edge.
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Instead of using generic urban texture tiles, towns are modeled using hand-placed 3D objects (although they'll only appear at short range to keep the frame rate manageable). What a delight to see them in a fully realized game. The volumetric clouds, the atmospheric lighting, and the weather effects are the stuff of tech demos. IL-2 is arguably the most beautiful flight sim to date.
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Volumetric clouds are one of the impressive visual effects in IL-2. It has all the fidelity, immersion, playability, polish, and graphical splendor that enriched classics like Red Baron, Aces over the Pacific, Falcon 3.0, and European Air War. This is one of those simulations that reminds you why you love the genre. IL-2 Sturmovik is destined to be a classic.