IL-2 Cliffs of Dover PC
Ubisoft and 1C: Maddox Games brings a new series of World War II combat flight simulators to the PC in their continuation of the great series IL-2 Sturmovik.
Ratings:
Graphics & Audio: 18/25,
Gameplay: 16/25,
Creativity 18/25,
Fun 16/25
Total: 68/100
IL-2 Sturmovik seemed much like a full flight simulator for World War II pilots, long missions behind the stick of popular planes of the time are common. The game had a lot of customization and you could really do a lot with configuring the games settings along with the full campaign that was fun to revisit time and again.
Cliffs of Dover is the recent release from the same maker of the previous editions of IL-2 Sturmovik, 1C: Maddox, but like previous releases the game needs a lot of tweaking and work. Cliffs of Dover even though misnamed is a very well made but still young combat simulator that uses almost realistic flight characteristics and physics.
Il-2 Cliffs of Dover has two main campaigns with a free flight combat section for flying but also has a useful tutorial and mission builder. The tutorials will initiate you to the complex world of the Il-2, a plane if you haven’t found out by now, as well as get you started with flying against real aces.
Even though the game does not have an IL-2 in it you will get a crack at a wide variety of World War II combat planes as well as flight using a variety of characteristics. In the Il-2 series you can use settings to turn on and off things like separate engine functions and a wide range of graphics.
You can use the simplified engine settings or adjust the throttle, each engines air and fuel mix and the wide variety of other settings. The other graphics settings like clouds and ground features can be turned on and off to tweak you’re in game visuals for better performance or better frame rates.
Once you have controls and flight basics down you can start in on your campaigns by choosing between the German or British sides of the Battle of Britain. Once in each mission you will be allowed to read a brief about the main story but like so many games the story between the good stuff is uninteresting and not necessary.
The main focus on this flight simulator is the missions and flying, you get a briefing on what the mission is and what you need to do but this is very sparse in detail. Mostly you fly and fight against your enemies in period accurate fighters in simple mission that are usually just combat patrols looking for enemy fighters or bombers.
The German side has more attack based missions flying either fighters, fighter/bombers or straight bombers against targets in Britain. The British side is almost exclusively fighters protecting the home land of Britain and also mostly routine patrols looking for an enemy to fight.
The campaign is a bit of a hit and miss affair where you fly with a group of fighters and try your best to accomplish the briefed mission of chasing away the enemy. Mostly in the missions I flew I simply tried my best to shoot down a couple of fighters or bombers and hoped the objectives were accomplished.
The quick missions and build your own missions or campaign work better than the two campaigns in that you can jump into single missions that are pretty much self-contained and don’t rely on scripting to finish. The campaign is plagued with several problems like not accomplishing the scripted objectives and a poor briefing makes the single missions more enjoyable.
I did enjoy jumping into quick missions but this game seems more like a fans dream than a newcomer’s game to try out for a fun combat flight sim. I do enjoy flight sims and was fanatical about Microsoft’s Flight Sim 2 and its great campaign but Il-2 Cliffs of Dover falls far short.
Cliffs of Dover needs a lot of work in more than just tweaking to make it enjoyable but I had no problems playing the game at medium settings. If I cranked the settings to high I had lower frame rates and several times in the campaign I was overrun by several planes that would lower frame rates to a crawl.
I found some settings that worked pretty well but it will take a few patches or some better tweaking to get the game optimized for play on an ordinary computer. Il-2 Cliffs of Dover like its predecessors will take some getting used to and with the lack of other options of other combat flight games this may make a worthwhile purchase if you’re into combat flight sims.
Cliffs of Dover looks great and sounds pretty good with well-done graphics and very realistic flight models but with too many problems that make it a fans game and not a casual pickup. Il-2 Cliffs of Dover has plenty of problems but if you enjoy realistic World War II flight combat games this is well worth a try.