Il-2 Sturmovik

In Soviet Russia, you shoot Sturmovik from above!

IL-2 Sturmovik is a World War Two Combat Flight Simulator for the PC. It was originally started by Russian game developer Oleg Maddox as a hobby garage project featuring the famous Soviet ground attack plane, which also lent the game its name. It was kept even after the game got heavily expanded and commercially released, spawning this juggernaut of a series shortly afterward. The branding has stuck to the point where the formerly-titled sequel Storm of War: Battle of Britain is now IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover.

The game, along with its three main sequels and numerous expansion packs, features literally hundreds of planes (most of them flyable), dozens of detailed gameplay maps in every possible theater of the war and also the opportunity to fly as some of the less famous Axis and Allied powers (e.g. Finland, The Netherlands, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, |Australia, New Zealand, the French and Polish resistance). The expansion pack IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 features several Alternate History campaigns with many American, German and Russian prototype planes that never made it into service during the war (many of them early jet fighters).

The difficulty and accuracy of the flight mechanics are extremely scalable, making the game accessible to pros and amateurs alike. You can easily customize the difficulty and realism [dead link] of flight and air combat, turning the game either into a semi-realistic arcade dogfighter or a punishingly realistic Nintendo Hard flight sim. The game also offers a lot of freedom for creating custom missions and campaigns in it's simple and intuitive Level Editor, and is generally opened to adding player-created custom content (including the possibility to add your own skins for the various aircraft or new music and sound files into the game). There's a giant fan community and tons of game mods in addition to the official releases. It's no secret that part of the series' success lay in a dedicated modding community worldwide. A large part of the original modder projects even became official parts of the later sequels.

The series so far consists of these installments:

  • IL-2 Sturmovik (2001): The original that started it all. Universally praised by both critics and gamers, it's often credited with resurrecting and revolutionizing the whole combat flight sim genre.
  • IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles (2003): The first stand-alone sequel, formerly announced as a mere expansion pack. Focuses mainly on less cited aerial theatres (e.g. skirmishes between the Finnish and Soviet air forces during the Winter War and Continuation War).
  • Forgotten Battles: Ace Expansion Pack (2004): The first expansion pack, which added several new nations and lots of other additional content to the first two games.
  • Forgotten Battles: Gold Pack (2004): Another expansion.
  • Pacific Fighters (2004): The one Oddly-Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo, adding aircraft carriers and focusing chiefly on the Pacific theatre in all its entirety.
  • IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 (2006): The last main installment in the original series, featuring the aforementioned Alternate History elements.
  • Sturmoviks over Manchuria (2007): A small expansion pack that mostly added a few more campaigns.
  • IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey (2009): A console-exclusive title (though it got ported to PC as Wings of Prey shortly thereafter). Not officially part of the original series, but generally considered an Adaptation Distillation Spin-Off of it for the console audience.
  • IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover (2011): The sequel formerly titled Storm of War: Battle of Britain. Likely to bring even more realistic flight models and a new graphics engine that'll bring high-end gaming desktops to their knees for the next few years if maxed-out.
Tropes used in Il-2 Sturmovik include:
  • A-Team Firing: The Rookie and Average A.I. pilots in quick battle mode tend to be this (though, to be fair, the Average A.I. only misses you if you're in a turn and only just; if you're flying straight and level, you're screwed). The Veteran and Ace Pilots? Not so much.
  • Ace Pilot: Lots of Real Life aces and entire ace squadrons from the era. Also, YOU too can become a celebrated ace (at least in dynamic career campaigns), but you really need the guts and a lot of skill to achieve such status.
    • Ace Custom: Besides unique custom plane skins representing a certain ace, there are also a few slightly modified versions of standard Axis and Allied fighters, flown by famous aces of WWII.
  • Airstrike Impossible: Missions over heavily defended areas and fronts (with lots of AA batteries and patrol planes everywhere). Not very common, but there are some.
  • All There in the Manual
  • Alternate History: The main content of the 1946 installment, both plane-wise and mission-wise. Despite its speculative nature, it manages to nicely avert most "alternate WWII" clichés and the Stupid Jetpack Hitler and Soviet Superscience tropes. Definitely deserves a Type I on the Sliding Scale of Alternate History Plausibility.
  • Anti-Air: Lots of various static and vehicle-mounted anti-aircraft weapons. Rookie pilots will quickly learn not to play hero and attack them head-on, instead trying out some evasive manouvevers before diving and spraying the target with a burst of explosive ammo (or rockets, if the plane is carrying any). AA guns are pretty much the ultimate nightmare while storming a heavily fortified enemy airfield and take some skill and practice to be effectively taken out, with minimal losses or damage on part of the player.
  • Attack Pattern Alpha: During all missions, you can give a wide range of orders to your wingmen (if you're commanding any, that is).
  • Auto Pilot Tutorial: Seriously... On the bright side, these tutorial vids also have a fair share of interesting and action-packed moments and very often even a joke or two.
  • Battleship Raid: Quite a few examples, both literal (mainly in Pacific Fighters) and figurative (hunting down bombers, especially large ones).
  • Big Bulky Bomb:
    • There are at least several enormous bombs that one can load onto an aircraft[1]; the blasts from these are so big that, depending on the computer hardware running the game, their detonations can slow down the game. And then there's their destructive power...
    • Fan-made mods add 1950s-era jet planes, armed with Mk 7 and Mk 21 freefall nuclear bombs. Surprisingly, they're less bulky than some of the conventional explosives.
  • Color-Coded Armies/Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Axis planes are always blue and Allied planes always red on the map and dogfighting HUD. The basic colour designation never changes, regardless of which faction you're playing for.
  • Coming in Hot: The higher the realism settings, the higher the chance of returning to base with a barely flyable machine (or not returning at all). The game's manual even advises the player to drop any remaining bomb, rocket or fueltank payloads before attempting an emergency landing. If the bottom of your fuselage is seriously damaged, chances are that your undercarriage will literally fall to pieces once you try to deploy it for landing. With a bit of luck, you can still land though... gliding slowly downward and skidding a bumpy ride on the fuselage. Or you can always just open the cockpit and bail out with a parachute...
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The A.I. pilots' flight model is simplified, and even though this has been toned down in the many patches, they still don't suffer from blackouts or engine overheating. They also have superior performance in general, but thankfully, this is not a problem in multiplayer...
    • A.I. pilots - and A.I. gunners - are absolutely unaffected by turbulence and G-forces, which leads to a curious situation where the most dangerous opponents in single player mode are modest attack aircraft with a rear gunner, as they can perform evasive manoeuvres whilst delivering a continuous stream of lethally accurate fire to your pilot's head. Whether this was intended to make the IL-2 itself more survivable (the real aeroplane suffered horrendous losses) is debatable.
  • Cool Plane: If you're a World War Two military aircraft buff, you'll consider these games as outright Technology Porn.
  • Covers Always Lie: A rare inverted example of this trope: the IL-2 is not the only plane you can fly in the first game (let alone the series), but the cover art and title seem to imply the exact opposite.
  • Danger Deadpan: Subverted hilariously. Your fellow wingmen speak in a cool-headed, deadpan, professional manner most of the time... but just wait until you get into a particularly difficult dogfight or someone gets shot down... Mood Whiplash and Rule of Funny ensues. One of the Japanese "shot down/bailing" quotes is a particularly Narmtastic scream.
  • The Dev Team Thinks of Everything: You can customize your pilot in CloD, selecting various flight suits and other equipment like life jackets and parachutes. You can also select not to wear a parachute, in which case bailing out causes your pilot to flail around as he plummets to his death.
  • Dieselpunk: To a degree, especially in 1946. It's got a more realistic than Rule of Cool tone though.
  • Do a Barrel Roll: And many other maneuvers, both basic and advanced... whether you're dogfighting or just plain flying around. Needless to say, they're depicted as realistically as possible, in keeping with the series tone.
  • Dodge by Braking: The realistic version of this trope. Also one of the basic manoeuvers while dogfighting in the game.
  • Duel to the Death: Happens frequently after encountering a large enemy squadron or Worthy Opponent Ace Pilot.
  • Eagle Squadron: There are some examples of this, but they're already more official variations of the trope (e.g. British pilots helping the US in the Pacific theatre) or have something to do with the Allied lend-lease project.
  • Enemy Exchange Program: Seen constantly, just like in the real Second World War. Often results in the Allied and Axis side both using some of the same aircraft models or brands.
  • Fighting For a Homeland: The Finnish, French, Polish and Soviet air forces would be the most clear-cut examples. Many additional fan-made mods also feature pilots of foreign occupied nationalities serving in the RAF (e.g. Czechoslovak fighter and bomber pilots). The French, Polish and Finnish air forces also double as La Résistance... the French forces being the Trope Namer, of course...
  • First Person Ghost: Played straight in cockpit view. Averted in all external views, where you can see the pilot characters clearly. They even make slight movements during flight.
  • Game Mod: Thousands of new planes, paint schemes, maps, new sound and graphic effects packs, you name it (though installing them into the game can be quite a headache, since there are several similar but different applications for doing so created by various mod teams; also, you have to make heads or tails of which version of the game you have and whether it's properly patched up, otherwise you're screwed). The game boasts an impressive worldwide modder base, probably one of the largest ones continually in existence.
  • Grey and Gray Morality/My Country, Right or Wrong/Worthy Opponent
  • High Altitude Battle:
    • Not as many as you would think, though a few missions involving bomber-busting start off in quite high altitudes.
    • More common in multiplayer as long as there are a few moderately experienced pilots around. Follows naturally from two or more pilots trying to achieve energy advantage over the other, or attempting to use their aircraft's high altitude performance to their advantage. These fights are usually of completely different nature than low or medium altitude dogfights and furballs. The low air density up high means the engines are also producing less power and thrust, but the airplanes need to move faster to produce sufficient lift. Luckily, low density air also reduces the drag, but maneuvering becomes much harder and slows down the aircraft rapidly, so the emphasis is usually on flying as cleanly and economically as possible, and the one who manages to gain an energy advantage usually wins. This can result in prolonged, high-tension battles, compared to fast-paced, action-packed low altitude fur balls.
  • The IL-2 Is About to Strafe Your Tank
  • Just a Stupid Accent/As Long as It Sounds Foreign: Averted. The pilots of every featured nation are voiced by genuine native speakers.
  • No Campaign for the Wicked: Spectacularly averted. The series in its full entirety deliberately features every possible nation that played at least some role in World War Two aerial warfare, both on the Allied and Axis side. Until recently, it was basically inverted, with regard to the Western Allies. Later expansions changed this, but it still holds to a degree; for example, there is still no campaign for USAAF fighters in Western Europe (there is one for them in the Pacific, but it's not nearly as in-depth as the ones for the USN or USMC).
  • Nose Art: Both in the form of actual nose art and selectable skins for the planes. The markings on your plane depend on the nation/faction you're flying for and can be turned off if you wish.
  • No Swastikas:
    • The German planes never carry the black swastika and the Finnish planes do not carry the historical Von Rosen cross, a light blue swastika on a white circle. This, despite the fact that the adoption of the Von Rosen cross predates the adoption of the swastika by the NSDAP by several years, and in any case was done to honor the Swedish count Erik Von Rosen, who had donated planes to Finland during their civil war. Soviet planes in the same game still carry the red star, which of course has unsavory connotations for many. In the real world, the Russian military still use the red star despite the Soviet Union having been gone for 20 years, although the version now carried by the Russian Air Force, at least, is a red star outlined in white and blue, thus including the three colors of the Russian Federations's flag. The original Russian version of the game has both German and Finnish swastikas. Russians don't seem to mind. Naturally, many fan-made skins for German and Soviet aircraft also prefer historical accuracy over inoffensiveness.
    • A humorous subversion appears in the case of smaller countries allied or subservient to the Axis powers. Romania, Slovakia and Hungary have stylized aircraft crosses unique to the era of their WWII regimes. These ultimately have the same connotations as Nazi Germany's swastikas, but the censors seemingly took a double standard approach in their case (probably because of the And Zoidberg status of the countries in the Axis). Anyway, this leaves these countries having more period-accurate insignia than the bigger players in the war. The insignia aren't completely uniform though: the skins donated to Forgotten Battles by Slovak modders feature both the roundels of the WWII regime and the local La Résistance.
  • Old School Dogfighting: Well, duh...
  • Rare Vehicles: The 1946 expansion added some speculative implementations of German and Soviet prototype aircraft, most notably the Heinkel Lerche (the aircraft that looks like a rocket/cigar surrounded by a shrouded turbofan).
  • Roboteching:
    • Some of the German fighters in 1946 (the Ta-152C, Ta-183, and Lerche) carry X-4 guided missiles. Of course, as the setting saw the beginning of guided weaponry, these missiles have to be manually guided to their targets.
    • A recent patch for 1946 adds in several more actual WWII-era guided weapons (namely the German Hs-293 anti-ship missile and Fritz-X radio guided bomb, and the American Razon guided bomb and Bat anti-ship guided bomb). Although the first three also have to be manually guided, the Bat is a "fire-and-forget"-type weapon.
  • See the Whites of Their Eyes: Justified, since this is the most reliable way of scoring a One-Hit Kill against enemy aircraft, especially if you're dogfighting aboard a fighter against other fighters. It also eats up much less ammo compared to attempts of shooting someone down from a far greater distance (like, say, a mile or two).
  • Shoot the Fuel Tank: Played straight with some aircraft, subverted with others. It all depends on what class, type and specific model of aircraft are you shooting at. Each has different design weaknesses, including vulnerable (and well exploitable) construction flaws.
  • Shown Their Work: And how!
  • Sink the Life Boats: Shooting parachutes. You can shoot the pilot, leaving his lifeless body dangling on the chute. Or you can shoot the chute, sending the poor devil plummeting to his death.
  • Some Dexterity Required: The flight models are generally very twitchy and unforgiving of hamfisted flying. If you don't handle the stick and rudder with finesse, you WILL get the aircraft into a nasty stall or spin that you can only recover from after massive altitude loss-if you don't get shot up while trying to recover. In addition, gunnery is very difficult and will require a steady stick. This is especially true if you turn on all the realistic settings. The whole game can be controlled easily via keyboard, but joysticks are generally the better controller on higher and more professional difficulties.
  • Storming the Airbase
  • Subsystem Damage: Individual cockpit instruments can be shot out, in addition to control surfaces, engines, fuel tanks (they may just leak instead of outright exploding) and of course, the pilot.
    • The most recent patch added support for realistic pilot injuries: your avatar can injure each limb separately, which affects how well the plane can be controlled. You can also bleed to death, fast or slow depending on how heavily you are losing blood, and non-lethal head injuries create a red haze on your view.
  • Tech Demo Game: Especially when it first came out in 2001. Amazingly, if you purchase the final 1946 edition of the game and crank up all the graphic settings to "perfect", the game can still put quite a bit of strain even on a current high-end computer. Not bad for a game that started development in the second half of The Nineties.

This series also completely (and notably) averts the following aviation tropes:

  1. ↑ The biggest in the game, excluding Game Mods, is the Russian 5,000-kilogram (11,000-pound) FAB-5000, which can only be carried by the non-player-flyable Petlyakov Pe-8 heavy bomber.
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