IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey

Chasing lock-on tones from a mile away makes modern aerial combat feel almost clinical, but in IL-2 Sturmovik, you’re flying by the seat of your pants — and you might need to change them before the mission’s over. Air battles in World War II were about spotting your opponent in the clouds, maneuvering into position behind them, and unleashing a torrent of bullets that knocked them out of the sky. It was harrowing then, and it’s harrowing here in the best possible way.

But the first thing you’ll notice about IL-2 Sturmovik is how loudly, proudly, and unmissably gorgeous this game is. The scenery is lushly spectacular, the clouds billow like cotton candy, and the planes gleam brightly… until you shoot them full of holes and send them plunging to the ground trailing oily black smoke. It’s no mirage, either. When you descend to skim the treetops, the landscapes don’t reveal themselves to be low-res and nasty — IL-2 is just as pretty from 15,000 feet as it is from 150. So it’s a shame that Gaijin went with such a busy, distracting, and oddly modern in-game HUD. Sure, we recognize that no one would play the game if you could only look down the iron sights and shoot by dead reckoning (as real WWII pilots did), but the developers went a step too far. In busy battles, the sky almost turns red with HUD indicators for the enemies, and that anachronism gives you such a sensation of falseness that it sometimes breaks the WWII-combat illusion the game otherwise creates so wonderfully.

While we were never quite able to tune that out, it didn’t stop us from being mesmerized by the scope and scale of the battles. In Stalingrad, you’ll dive-bomb tanks in the devastated city streets while the skies above are choked with enemy planes nipping at your heels. It’s just as exhilarating to weave past spotlights in the night sky over Germany, or to climb to 18,000 feet over the Italian coast, set the throttle to zero, and fall out of the clouds dropping bombs on coastal batteries. IL-2 succeeds because it makes gameplay out of awesome, intense moments like that. We’ll never forget the first time we played chicken with an enemy pilot, closing in and then suddenly rocketing past his aircraft as the air whooshed loudly around and bullets clanged and thudded nerve-rackingly into our own plane.

But as exciting as all those moments were, IL-2’s missions feel like they’re lacking a little something. In games like HAWX or Ace Combat 6, the world constantly changes and evolves around you. But here, all your objectives politely wait for you to finish them, and in general they tend to be more simple in nature — shoot this, bomb that, fly home. And there’s not really a cohesive plot to hold the 20-mission campaign together; the game’s more of a highlights reel of WWII’s air battles. That’s hardly a terrible thing, but it does make it a tad less satisfying.

Fortunately, IL-2 builds in more depth elsewhere. If you’re hardcore about flight sims, you’ve probably loved the IL-2 series on the PC, and its console debut also includes a hardcore simulation mode. We got very good at crashing in it — we could pancake our plane in under a minute! — so it won’t make a pilot out of you, but if you’re already one, you’ll feel the love. And yes, there’s an arcade setting that makes any gamer feel instantly competent. Whew!

Better yet, someone finally invented air-combat multiplayer that doesn’t involve flying in endless, boring loops. You can do that too in the Dogfight and Team Dogfight modes, but the star here is Airfield mode, where you capture an airstrip by landing your plane, which starts running up a clock. While allies defend you, enemies try to blow you off the runway or just kamikaze into your parked plane. It’s great, frantic fun, and so is the Strike mode, where you form teams and try to defend your city while bombing the opponent’s to pieces. All these modes have one weakness — you really need a full complement of 16 players for them to be fun. Smaller numbers means too much empty space, too few opponents, and way too little fun to hold anyone’s interest.

So while IL-2 doesn’t quite manage to be the awesomest air-combat game of all time, it comes temptingly close. And really, between the gangbuster graphics and the sensational dogfights, it’s definitely worth taking for a ride.