The best world war flight simulator I've ever played. With detailed planes that creak and groan under high load, or in the case of the WWI planes snap the wings off, you can almost feel the desperation of the many thousands who died over the skies of Europe. Or the glee of victory after you've swatted the enemy out of the air before limping home with a failing engine or broken ailerons.

The flight model is great. Despite much tinkering over the years, the AI is only a menace at times. This makes multiplayer a much more rewarding arena for skilled pilots, though singleplayer is still fun and has many settings to tweak to provide a fairly easy or deadly difficult mission profile. The developers have continued to work on their project and have released several significant updates recently, along with new planes.

When on sale the base game can be had for a very nice price, though the WWI planes and the later WWII maps are less generously priced. With each map you get new planes so its well worth it. From rinkydink fighters to bloated bombers, IL-2 has nearly everything you'd want to fly. And some you'd rather not.

Somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes of IRL minutes at x8 speed flying on autopilot with nothing interesting happening. Just loads and loads of sea as I do an escort mission for bombers just turning left and right and left and right and left and right and left and right and left and right for eternity. Eyes just closing as I wait for the perpetual motions to just end or change or something...

Most boring experience I have ever had.

Been in the WW2 flight simulation "business" for more than 25 years and I can state that IMHO this is the best WW2 flight simulator until now, no doubt, but again, from my perspective it has some important flaws that SHOULD BE CORRECTED by the developers, which are as follows:

- Log output/interface files should be provided a more user friendly way to allow the community be able to walk the extra mile developing dynamic multiplayer campaigns or online competitions which need backed by data and stats extracted from the file output of the game. There are some of these online dynamic campaigns developed by the community -with a great effort on their side, thanks for that guys-, but still not many/enough due to the difficulty to programmatically handle these output files provided by the game engine to assemble some dynamic campaign that is able to provide a wider set of features that the ones that can be provided at the moment due to this limitation, and they should be provided, of course, on an better standardised way to allow precisely this and unlike the way they actually are generated or, at least, to not force community developers to have to deal with a very complex parsing process of these files as it is necessary now due to a lack of a properly designed data output interface to allow the developing of nicer parsers with more functionalities and to make community developer's lives easier. In summary, devs need to get closer to the customers' needs so everyone wins by building a bigger hardcore community which, at the end, translates into more income for the product.

- CONTACT SPOTTING: For me (and many others according to the IL2 forum posts) THIS IS THE WORST FLAW in the game. Contact spotting is very very hard, the bigger screen you go (or the better, if you want to put it that way, with a higher native resolution) the bigger your contact spotting problem is, as visibility rendering of far contacts is not done proportionally to the size of the screen or the resolution the game is running at, so most of the so called "ace pilots" which are flying using an old 27" 1080p screen have perfect contact spotting (they get a clear advantage as the 50% of the fight goes to the one that is able to spot a contact first) while other pilots using 34" or bigger screens are literally "blind" in comparison to these, when it comes down to spotting far contacts when using the native resolution of their bigger screens, what leads pilots that use a nice 34"+ 4K screen to have to lower their native screen resolution to be able to somehow remain a little bit competitive, AND STILL, far contact spotting is not nearly as good as the one enjoyed by pilots using smaller screens using their native 1080p resolution. TO PROVIDE THE SAME VISUAL EXPERIENCE in all screen resolutions should be a priority for devs to make the whole thing fair and not turn it into a totally frustrating unfair experience.

I own the whole set of DLCs of both IL2 BoS and Flying Circus (which I do not even use because I am not really interested in the WWI flying era) to show devs my commitment with this type of product, this project and the effort, and that is why I would like my feedback (not just mine but also from fellow comrades trying to achieve a nice experience using big screens) regarding the problems I observe to be taken in consideration as something that NEEDS LOOKED AT AND FIXED to improve the customer experience on this great flight simulator.