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The original Il-2 Sturmovik, released in 2001, was an extraordinary game. The original Sturmovik featured fantastic detail, spectacular graphics (at the time) and a varied selection of aircraft to pilot and to boot it focused on WWII's Eastern Front, something that had not received much attention in any WWII game. After it's successful release Sturmovik's developers, Maddox Games, turned their efforts to creating an expansion pack. However, this said expansion grew and grew and Maddox announced that the expansion pack they were developing had in fact turned into a fully fledged sequel to IL-2 Sturmovik. It's name? Il-2 Sturmovik: The Forgotten Battles. Did the switch from expansion pack to sequel work? The Forgotten Battles is really more like an expansion to those who already own the original but it is definitely the biggest, most feature-packed, updated expansion I have ever played. The Forgotten Battles may not be what Sturmovik fans were hoping for in a sequel but it has a lot of things going for it and for those without Stumovik it is a chance to be introduced to a larger, more polished, more structured IL-2 Sturmovik.
Gameplay - 7.5/10:
The Forgotten Battles includes nearly everything from the original Sturmovik, all the planes and maps are there but, thankfully, the original missions and campaigns have been shown the door. One of the major problems with the original Sturmovik was the very poor campaign system and thankfully it has been ditched in favour of a new one. The Forgotten Battles now offers 20 new single-player missions along with 10 multi-player missions that vary from missions of defense, escort, bombing raids, air superiority and much more. Enemy AI is exceptionally good and you will be presented with a challenge on every mission.
Unlike the original you can now chose to fly as the Finns and the Hungarians as well as the Russians and the Germans. Each side is portrayed accurately with national insignia and so forth and each side speaks their respective language. A nice little touch. You also take control of the Americans in one mission but I won't spoil it for you. While these single-player missions are of good quality, varied and exciting they do suffer from some minor problems. Load times is the major one, with times exceeding to minutes for even the mightiest computer. There is also the occasional cough and splutter during the game as more data is processed, once again, even on higher-end CPUs and 3D chips.
Built into the game is a full mission editor and a quick mission builder that lets you craft a variety of air engagements and air-to-ground engagements. In the quick mission builder, you are given several variables which you can configure yourself, such as the type and number of friendly and enemy aircraft, their loadouts, the AI skill level, starting altitude, weather, objectives and more. As a bit of damper you only get three maps to play this quick missions on, no new ones either, these maps are recycled from the original.
Thankfully, the campaign system has been revamped for The Forgotten Battles (Yes, yes, you can stop your cheering now...). What we now have is a dynamic mission generator. At the beginning of the campaign you choose which side you want to fly for, the starting year and region of your campaign and the general type of plane you wish to fly. Before you get too excited, this new campaign system does have its problems and sadly they were seen in the original Sturmovik as well. First off, you will have to test your patience against some stupidly long load times. The next major issue is attuned to the heavily realistic nature of the game. You may find yourself having to travel upwards of 100 kilometres just to get to your objective! Thankfully, someone was nice enough to include time-compression and autopilot making it not so much of a problem more an inconvenience. Missions in the single pilot's career also start to get repetitive and similar very quickly. Overall, however, you do get a lot of variety through all the different career paths available.
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