Preview: IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey (360)

First thing we did was enter the tutorial. Controlling the aircraft was far simpler than we expected with barrel rolls and the like being easy to execute. The only problem we encountered with the controls was the ability to look around your aircraft. To do so you need to press down on the right stick and then move it, something that is easier said than done with the camera often zooming all over the place as you try to track down the enemy aircraft. It’s a disorientating experience.

Once we got to grips it was time to enter the fight. There are two playable missions, in the first you control a British pilot in a dogfight against a large number of enemy bombers. While we were hoping for something a little faster paced it did ease us into the aerial combat. It looks lovely as you rain gunfire down on the Nazi forces. There’s a great amount of detail in the planes and you can see them slowly start to fall apart as the bullets hit, then in a final act the pilots decide to bail out. Disappointingly you can’t actually shoot down the parachutes, something we tried and failed at. The attention to detail even passes down onto the ground, which is something so many flight sims forget about. Admittedly there’s only green fields down below on the first mission, but nevertheless they all look unique and don’t have the copy and paste feeling you get with other games in the genre. Once the mission is complete you get your rating to see how you fared. The strange thing is that you can actually give yourself unlimited continues, though getting shot down time after time reduces the score you get at the end of the mission, it does feel like cheating to us so it got turned off.

As the first demo mission concentrated on the aerial action, the second asks you to destroy a number of tanks and other enemy vehicles on the ground. It’s a little disappointing compared to the first. It doesn’t start off well when you’re asked to follow a river and stay as low as you possibly can to avoid being seen. It wants you to get stupidly low and if you’re not then it repeats the same phrase over and over again. In the end we got so low that we nosedived into the water. It gets better once you’re asked to blow stuff up, but we’re hoping the majority of the 50+ missions require more action in the air than the ground.

With one good and one bad mission it’s a little hard to really get an understanding of how well Birds of Prey will be. Nevertheless it’s still managed to come from obscurity and quickly jump onto our radar. Perhaps this is one to look out for next month.

Words by Adam Gulliver