Downloaded the demo yesterday from Xbox Live and put in about an hour and a half. I was unhealthily taken with the PC original several years ago and still have a very large collection of La-5FN skins on my hard drive.
Animadversions:
*The demo is stone-cold beautiful. IL-2 was one of the first games to give you the feel of flying a WWII fighter. I spent hours just buzzing cities at tree-top level and doing Immelmanns and Split-S's. This continues that proud tradition.
*It's very odd having the throttle mapped to the right thumbstick as opposed to having it on a dedicated flight-yoke throttle slider. I keep expecting that controller to be a yaw controller (almost in parallel to a strafe in an FPS).
*It was a bad choice to have the "realistic" and "simulator" modes available only after completing the first mission in "arcade". I'm in the community this game is aiming at and we don't much cotton to working our way through tedious blast-em missions just to earn the right to test the flight model.
*The "simulator" mode is merciless. Not more than 1 in 50 people who play this game will stick with it -- I have spoken. Just take one example: banking is a "pushing the envelope" proposition (as it is in reality). Turn too hard and you will enter an ugly spin. This can be profoundly frustrating if you're not ready for it...and if the guy who is ready for it quickly winds up on your six. I can see entire on-line games degenerating into contests of who can stay in the air the longest. These will last approximately 10 minutes before all participants dismiss the game in a snit of rage and go back to playing [insert arcade game here].
Not enough time to really judge, but it's looking right at the moment...
Like Daffy said: "Check me, I'm a buzz-boy!"
Thursday, July 30, 2009
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