Realistic mode also turns off the bullet lead calculation, so you have to lead your targets yourself without the assistance of a computed aiming point. And, while it's true that fighter planes certainly spin more easily than, say, a Cessna, having every goddamn stall result in a spin makes flying in realistic mode in IL-2 very, very difficult. A spin is far more difficult to recover from. But, in IL-2 every stall results in a spin. Your angle of attack increases beyond the critical angle for the speed at which you're flying, the controls lose authority, the nose drops, the angle of attack corrects, you gain speed, and you're out of the stall. In a real airplane, a stall is pretty much a non-event. You're responsible for keeping the airplane out of a stall. In realistic mode, section-by-section damage is turned on, and the flight aids are turned off. Additionally, your rudder provides heading corrections with yaw-a real rudder does not control the heading of an airplane, but is rather used in coordination with the other control surfaces to maintain proper flight. Your angle of attack is restricted such that you never stall, and your wings self-level if you let go of the aileron stick. The basic flight model is the same in all of them, but arcade mode includes a bunch of flight assistance. There are three difficulty modes: arcade, realistic, and simulation. But, it also has some deep playability issues. On the one hand, it doesn't play like X-Wings Over Europe. History aside, I have rather mixed feelings on this game. These are exceptionally boring, and focus on trying to build sympathetic characters instead of exploring the history of the air battles. The campaign is broken down into various real battles (Stalingrad, The Bulge, etc.), but the only real context given is "diary entries" by the playable pilots. Unfortunately, the game rather fails to provide any idea of the historical context for the air battles you fight. But, they did, and having done a fair bit of reading now, it appears that the skies over the Soviet Union actually saw significant action. I had never considered the fact that the Soviet Union must have had an airforce during the war. Personally, I love this decision, since it's introduced me to an aspect of aviation history with which I was unfamiliar. This is a WWII fighter game made by 1C (a Russian game developer), named after the most-produced military aircraft in history (the IL-2).Īs an interesting turn of events, IL-2 focuses on the Eastern Front of the war-for those of you rusty on history, that'd be the German invasion of the Soviet Union. While I'm waiting for a used copy of Alpha Protocol to show up, I've been playing IL-2.