This weeks Throwback Thursday is going to be about World War 2 flight simulators. Which means we will take a look at old but one of the best WW2 flight simulator series, IL-2 Sturmovik.

IL-2 might be old, but still great with tons of nostalgia!

I remember playing IL-2 Sturmovik in 2005. That’s 4 years after its original release in 2001. I played it on my Thrustmaster Joystick and Athlon X2 CPU and Nvidia GT 230. For its time the game looked fantastic! It still kinda does look decent now even. The game takes place during WW2 on the Eastern Front and the war between mainly Russia and Germany, though you can choose several different countries as well. The game features 31 flyable planes and additional 40 non-flyable planes.

What fascinated me about this game was the very well made damage model of each plane. In the game you can shoot holes into the plane, shoot wings and parts of the plane away, it can catch on fire and you can try extinguishing it and more. Such damage model is not really seen in any other game. And that was 2001 remember. The best thing about that was that you could just do some fun crash landings and see your plane getting ripped apart as it touched the ground. I really like good damage modeling in games, even though developers usually don’t pay too much attention to it.

The game has also very good physics modeling for the planes, any damage on the plane will affect flying in some way. It is even possible to land a damaged plane with damaged wings which is unable to steer the plane you could control the thrust of engines to steer the plane and possibly land it, if you are lucky. Oh how many times I just crash landed even with fully working plane just for fun, good times.

The series continues with few sequels, standalones and DLCs adding more planes and more nationalities. Sadly in my opinion no sequel is as good as the original. I tried playing the first sequel called IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey. But it was dull, mostly because it was made for consoles, funnily enough Gaijin, the developer, later used it to make their most successful War Thunder game. Another sequel is IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover but that was awful, unoptimised and full of bugs. The last sequel is IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad, it’s supposedly not bad, but I personally have not played it.

So that wraps it up for today, if you are a fan of flight simulators you should give this series a look even thought it’s a bit old today.