I banked to get a clear view, but there was no parachute. Returning to Cologne, I watched in horror as my wingman caught fire, dark clouds of smoke standing out against a landscape covered in snow. Minutes later, I found myself miles from the city, running a wounded 109 to ground with sustained fire. As we wheeled in on a pair of German fighters, we split up, each of us taking on a single enemy plane. Hanging off my wingman’s left rear, I found myself constantly working the throttle to maintain my distance. The hardest part by far, for me at least, was staying in formation. We met a wing of Bf 109s over the target, and the fight was on. In my first mission, my wing was assigned to protect a formation of A-20 medium bombers over Cologne. It was December, and below me the Battle of the Bulge was raging. The setting was along the Western border of Germany in 1944. After practicing at the Mustang for a few nights, I fired up a campaign as a member of the United States’ 378th fighter squadron. Just flying around in uncontested airspace is lots of fun, but where things get interesting is in the game’s career mode. The game is also fully compatible with virtual reality, although I had much higher frame rates using a G-Sync monitor and Track IR. But, after just a few nights of practice, I was strafing ground targets with ease, and holding my own against medium-grade enemy pilots. Moving from Flight Simulator’s aerobatic red biplane to a P-51 in IL-2 was surprisingly easy, with the only caveat being that stalling the Mustang is much easier to do and far more difficult to correct.
The first is a series called IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles, and it might just be the greatest World War II combat flight sim of the last decade.Īn excellent point of entry into the series is the latest version, titled IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Bodenplatte, which came out in October 2019. If you’re looking for something a little more challenging, for an experience that builds the tension in an almost cinematic way, there are a couple of other games that I’d like to introduce you to.
The simulation starts all over again as if nothing happened. Push the nose down and fly too fast, get your angle of approach wrong on landing, or lose your bearings in a cloudy mountain valley and the screen just fades to black. While it includes eye-popping terrain and an excellent collection of real-world aircraft, the gameplay is absent of any real feeling of consequence. Microsoft Flight Simulator launched just a little over a month ago, reminding the entire world just how awe-inspiring simulation games can be.
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