Recent reviews by Chief Zuma

Wacky, fun units. I like it.

This is a pretty weird one but I'm so glad they finally did it because it connects to the design history of a lot of other aircraft in the game. The Fw-190 D-9, for example, was actually a stop-gap produced with existing tooling for fighter units to use while they waited to get the Ta-152 lines up and running (the war ended before that happened.) Part of the fighter pilots' revolt was over the issue of cancelling production of Bf 109 K-4s in favor of this thing.

Okay, so enough history: How does it fly? The answer is... okay-ish. Not because it's a bad plane, but because IL-2 tends to be a low-altitude game, despite the best efforts of mission makers. Planes geared towards high altitude combat, like the P-47, tend not to shine their brightest in IL-2. That said, the 152 (as of my writing this) is rocking a nearly 2:1 K/D ratio on Combat Box, so it's definitely no slouch.

Part of being a high altitude fighter is having large wings and boy does this fighter have large wings. You're not going to be rolling around with ease like you may be used to in other Focke Wulf aircraft, but the upside is that you can turn surprisingly well. Speed is surprisingly not as good as I imagined. Doubtless this is an area where the 152 really needs to be up high to be in its element, but I found a lot of situations where I just could not catch aircraft.

I definitely recommend the Ta-152 for being one of the most interesting experiences you can have with late war German fighters, but I'm personally still a bigger fan of the Bf 109 K-4.

I am a little upset about this.

I bought this module years ago, and have enjoyed flying it, but RAZBAM got into a fight with ED over a DIFFERENT MODULE and decided to make their point by ceasing support for all of their modules including this one. This module is now broken because of the lack of support.

RAZBAM decided to punish their customers to put pressure on ED. Whatever the merits or faults of their position wrt to ED, this is an unacceptable way to treat customers and a violation of trust. I will never support RAZBAM or anyone connected with it again.

Even pure-distilled evil will die if you shoot it with enough guns

Really strong allied divisions and pretty mid to weak German divisions if that's your jam

I've spent a fair amount of time with it and I'm reluctant to join the negative hype train but I just haven't been able to find any reason to play this over the classic versions of these two games on Steam. None of the issues with the old games (namely that horrible audio/visual effect that never goes away from power ups in 2) has been fixed and a few new issues have been added. The mission complete cutscenes for the campaign in 2 are just gone. The graphics don't even really look any better than with the classic editions.

Basically this is just a huge missed opportunity. They games are still fun but they're no better than the existing editions of them. I can't recommend forking over the cash given that.

It's really, really great to see this on Steam finally, and it's a pleasant surprise to me that it worked immediately on my Windows 10 setup right out of the box. I only regret that there is no support for modern resolutions. I get that 4K would be probably a bit wonky here, but at least 1080 would have been nice.

The game itself needs not introduction. It is still every bit as fun as I remember it being.

It's actually pretty good now that they've fixed the engine.

Whether you like this campaign or not will depend on a number of factors:

-How much time do you have? You fly from England to France and back for most of these missions. It's about a 35-45 minute trip to get across the channel, but the campaign creator has been kind enough to let your mission count as complete where ever you decide to quit, so if you screw something up there's no need to do the whole thing over again. I wish more campaign creators did this.

-Do you like ground attack? Because that's your main job here. You're a member of the 354th FG, which is an interesting outfit historically. They were the first fighter group to get the Mustang, and they were also the only Mustang FG in the 9th AF, whose job was mostly ground attack. So what you'll be doing here is a lot of what would normally be P-47 work, just in a mustang, which I think is a lot of fun, but if you're looking for a strictly air-to-air campaign, this is not it. That said, the author did a lot to add variety to the missions and it's not like career mode, where you just do the same thing over and over.

I found the missions very dense in terms of assets used, almost pushing the limits of what the engine can handle. Certain areas, like the Normandy Beachhead, saw my fps dip majorly. It didn't really ruin my fun, but it was distracting at times.

Overall I'd recommend Overlord, if you have the time to fly really long missions.

Very nice change of scenery from the typical Euro countries! Lots of mountains and little villages.

That said - there are so many border posts and tolls on these roads that it is a chore to get through a lot of them. It's realistic sure, but going from Croatia to Montenegro, you pass... a lot of border posts, and do a lot of waiting and stopping in lines. I really wish there was an option to just be able to skip the inspection points. Realism or not, I just want to cruise.