(Bron IGN):
Russian developer and publisher 1C announced its entry into the console market last night with the unveiling of several new games, including IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey, the first console version of the heralded World War II flight simulation series that is known for its incredibly realistic flight modeling and attention to detail.
As Anatoly Subbotin, 1C's PR manager, explained to us, almost all the air combat games that appear on consoles are arcade games with a few flight simulation elements added to them. Birds of Prey will differ because it is a flight simulator with a few arcade elements added to it. At the same time, the game will feature variable realism settings, ranging from a very forgiving arcade flight mode (it's impossible to stall out or get in a spin) to a hardcore realism mode that is comparable to the PC game.
In other words, you're going to be as close to the challenges of real flight and dogfighting as you can get without strapping into a vintage World War II aircraft and actually taking off.
Birds of Prey will use the flight models that were developed for the PC game, but almost everything else was rewritten from scratch from the consoles. Visually, this is a gorgeous game; aircraft are rendered in sharp detail, but even more impressive were the fully 3D landscapes below. There are thousands and thousands of 3D trees, roads, villages, landmarks, cities, rivers, and more. Then there's a new damage modeling system where your plane can get chewed up pretty badly, to the point that it has gaping holes in the wings and fuselage, and that will affect your aircraft's handling on the more realistic difficulty levels.
The rest of the feature list is pretty impressive. There won't be a dynamic campaign, but there will be an instant mission mode along with about six campaigns, ranging from the Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, Sicily, the Ardennes, and the Fall of Berlin. These campaign modes will let you fly from the Allies' perspective in an array of historically realistic aircraft; you can fly Axis warplanes only in multiplayer. Speaking of which, the game will have extensive multiplayer support, so you can fly with a bunch of other pilots cooperatively or competitively in dogfights. In single-player, you can jump to different planes in your wing in mid battle or should the plane that you're in get shot down. Humongous battles can be modeled with around 100 planes in the sky at once, each with its own AI.
The realistic mode might make even die-hard PC flight simmers think about getting the console version. The most hardcore setting only allows you to fly from the virtual cockpit view, and there are no targeting or directional indicators aside to help you. Instead, you've got to rely upon your analog instruments and the old Mark 1 eyeball. Less realistic settings will let you change the camera around, so you can have an external view of your plane, and they'll have all sorts of user-friendly targeting indicators to tell you where the bad guys are.
There won't be any kind of central hero or protagonist that you follow throughout the game. After all, that wouldn't make sense having a single character flying for so many different nations in different theaters. Plus, this is war after all, and people die. So you will have a roster of characters, and your goal is to hopefully keep as many of them alive as possible, but if someone is killed, they're gone.
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