A Flight To Remember: IL-2 Sturmovik

IL-2 Sturmovik blew me away at Gamescom last year. With only a couple of weeks until I fly out to Cologne again, I'm enthusiastic about the prospect of another unexpected champion of gaming emerging from a cloudbank and peppering me with excitement. A year has passed since I took to the skies and development has continued at a steady rate. New planes are appearing and the modelling of existing ones is improving, but it's the dynamic campaign I'm most excited to see. Glorious great maps. Two new videos below.

I told a slight fib in that previous paragraph. That's the new video but because it isn't packed with in-game excitement and doesn't even contain a single map, I'm including footage from a stream that took place a couple of months ago. This is what you came here to see. Maybe. It's entirely possible you came here to see gifs of cats and teenagers falling off skateboards, in which case I direct you toward the rest of the internet.

Graham is planning to check out a recent build in the near future, to tell us more about the state of the skies. In the meantime, some words from Tim Stone.

Back in my own personal golden age of flight sims (1994's Dawn Patrol was one of the heroes of that age), I thought I'd be spending a good portion of my adult life in virtual cockpits, clutching a £100 stick with sweat-soaked palms. The chunky great manuals, incredible graphics and sheer complexity of flight sims were a defining aspect of PC gaming. For more than a decade, PC gamers who didn't regularly play flight sims would find the 'mark of the beast' carved into their doors, placed there by members of the elite who considered those who hadn't earned their wings to be outside the elite fraternity.

If you'd have told me back then that I'd spend more time driving virtual trucks than flying virtual planes, I would have thought you were speaking in jest.