33LIMA

Fortunately, the 'real' war is much more interesting...

I believe one of the volunteer mods became impatient with what was seen by him and some others as increasingly tedious and/or repetitive negativity. Some were caught in the crossfire, as it were, once the rounds started flying. The devs stepped in to cool it down. I think a cease fire has been ordered, though intermittent sniping may go on for some time.

Thanks Dave! And in case anyone is wondering, the air gunner made it out of that burning Stuka:

The verdict! Before we get down to brass tacks here, as a lead-in I'm going to run briefly through another SP campaign mission, illustrating some of the features that I think are worth highlighting at this point and have influenced my own verdict on IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad. This was a third effort at flying an intercept in a Yak-1, from our base north of Stalingrad to an area south of the city. Previous efforts had failed to meet my personal objectives, partly as I'd been happy to play the flight leader and see what happened when I cut the others loose on the target, resulting in them shooting it/them down (the good news) and me missing out on XP and unlocks and awards (the bad news). This time I decided to go in first and have my flight cover me. As seems normal with a repeated mission, the general target area was the same but the other details had changed - time of day (it was now dusk), we had a different flight plan and height, there were four in my flight instead of three and the targets were different. So there is some variety here, if replaying a mission. Time was short so I appreciated the option to choose an air start, mission by mission. Here we are (one Yak out of shot) on the leg in to the target/Action Point, with the mini-map zoomed out. Turning the 'HUD' off removes labels from aircraft and the map, as well as turning off the instrument readouts. In the brief run-in I experimented with formation changes which the AI executed slickly. I then gave them a 'cover me' command to ensure they didn't attack the enemy on sight, but stuck with me instead. Our targets turned out this time to be two He 111s escorted by I think a single 109. I made a beam attack on the two winter-camouflaged Heinkels while to my complete satisfaction, my flight moved in to get between me and the Messerschmitt. This resulted in a dogfight after a bit of jockeying for position, with the 109 initially going wide and attempting to threaten my flight-mates from above and behind, rather than rushing straight at them. My shooting hasn't got much better (the most recent update cuts the current lag between trigger pull and weapon firing, which will help) but it wasn't long before I had one of the bombers smoking. I took a noisy hit or two in return, but without suffering any serious damage. The visuals and effects are gorgeous, with vestigial tracer smoke trails, fantastic aircraft and lovely environmentals, like the terrain and clouds softly caught by the light of the setting sun. The finest of aviation art could do little better than this. I mean, look at the sun glinting on the props of the distant Heinkels, in the bottom pic. Beautiful. Having damaged one bomber and needing only to shoot it down (or damage one more enemy) to complete my mission goals, I decided to cut the flight loose. By this time the Heinkels were rapidly receding, once more escorted by a 109 and two of my flight reported they were too far away to engage. At this point some searchlights came on below and picked up the German bombers. After a few seconds held in the searchlights they turned left, probably having bombed whatever was protected by those lights, down there in the darkening snowscape. I led the flight after the Germans and repeated the dose. This time, my flight got the 109 and I was able to put in a couple more passes at both bombers. The one I hit first started straggling. As I was coming back for another pass at the smoking Heinkel, I saw him turn sharply. As I watched, his nose gradually went down, until he was falling from the sky, Clearly, the damage I had inflicted had become critical and he was doomed. The crew thought so too for they started bailing out. A kill! Though now very low on ammo, I decided to have a crack at the last Heinkel, which I had clipped with a burst earlier on. With a bit of luck I might nail him with my last few rounds; if not, I would call in the rest of my flight to knock him down. He was now very low and I suddenly noticed that he had his gear and flaps down and that his landing and navigation lights were on. Looking ahead of him, I saw an airbase, to which the German was evidently on his final approach. Evidently, the pursuit had taken us some way over into enemy territory! Now, it was my turn to be caught in searchlights, German ones this time! I fired off my last rounds at the big German bomber, then broke up and away, pursued by some desultory flak. Out of rounds at last, I climbed up and turned away, calling my flight back into formation. I wasn't going to risk our virtual necks in low-level operations over an enemy airfield, for the sake of finishing off one damaged bomber. The searchlights lit me up one last time as I banked around. Last I saw of the Heinkel, he had decided to execute a go-around and perhaps fly on to a less dangerous airfield. I left him to it. Darkness was creeping in on us and I didn't want to dally. Heading back towards friendly territory, a headlight on the ground to my left drew my attention to what I could see was a train (visible just above my canopy, in the pic below). This might have made a good opportunity target for my wingmens' remaining ammo, had I felt like risking them. Which I did not. A little further on, back over what I took to be friendly territory, a town was burning, perhaps the target of the He 111s earlier. If so, we had avenged our comrades! Soon, we were over the town of Beketovka on the Volga just south of Stalingrad, providing an excellent reference point for my final leg home and confirming the the fidelity and attention to detail with which BoS has recreated the battlefield's historical landscape. With the burning city itself below my left wingtip and looking down to my right, I got a shock to see some enemy aircraft wheeling about, low down over the frozen Volga. They looked to be single-engined types, possibly Stukas. Whatever they were, they did not molest us and with ammo low and in my case gone, I decided that honour had been satisfied and that we should all continue back to base, just to the north. The scale of this sortie had been small, but it was beautifully formed. The superb visuals; the sounds, the radio comms; the tactical handling of my flight; the air combat; the activity on the ground including searchlights and trains; the credible behaviour of the AI; the barren landscape with its battered towns rolling beneath us; the chance near-encounter with another German flight going about its own business...this mission alone was proof positive for me that BoS delivers a combat flight simulation that is deeply engaging on every level. And at the end of the mission, I actually could not wait to run through the results and check out what points I earned and what I might have unlocked! I would love to see flight results - kills and losses - added into the little sequence above which would be just enough to elevate BoS's mission handling to a much better level. But I have to say that the sim's distinctive approach to the player's role and his or her progression is something that, as a steadfast simmer, I can not only learn to live with, but to appreciate. Even if it were otherwise, to answer the question I left hanging at the end of Part 3, the depth and richness of the flying and air fighting experience delivered by BoS missions is really first class, worth coming back for more and the price of admission, on its own. Before I move on, just to cover briefly a couple of loose ends, below are the screens which show (top) on a 'Pilot card', your game profile's vital stats and (bottom) on a 'Plane card', where you stand with the unlocks for a particular aircraft, which shows both what you have unlocked, and what's left to unlock. And finally, while I haven't done any level bombing yet, here is the view from the Heinkel's Lofte bombsight, and what you see from the bombardier/navigator/airgunner position, looking back into the cockpit...which incidentally, famous test pilot Eric Brown disliked as contrary to appearances, pilot visibility was poor, dangerous in bad weather and producing a 'hall of mirrors' effect in strong sunlight. And just to be clear, missions aren't always as small-scale as the one described above. Two missions later, still flying my trusty Yak, four of us escorted six Sturmoviks on an exciting and successful low-level strike on German motor transport, ignoring a formation of 109-escorted Heinkels which were level-bombing some of our guys just over the front line. We fended off some intercepting Messerchmittts, one of which was my next kill after a difficult chase as, damaged by an early hit, he manoeuvred desperately to avoid me. That and at least one kill by a wingman was compensation for the one of our own that I knew we had lost Out of rounds I was chased towards Stalingrad by a German fighter, who gave up when a wingman rejoined me. Together we flew north back to base up the Volga, past blazing ruins in Stalingrad and the famous grain elevator, ignoring the Stukas buzzing angrily over the river. The BoS skies can be busy as well as dangerous. Perhaps only Russian developers could have recreated the time, the place and the combat so well. And so to the reckoning... Each CombatAce reviewer will have their own assessment but for me, this is a difficult one. It’s hard to avoid comparisons with other combat flight sims, especially with the original IL-2, which BoS's branding naturally invites. We do need to remember here that the original IL-2 is a product that's matured over almost exactly thirteen years of development and modding. And I think we need to take a deep breath and count to ten, before we rush to judgement on BoS's unconventional approach to some of the basics. In the developer blog, they point out that the unlocks are content that's been made available freely (albeit after 'grinding') rather than as Down-Loadable Content payware, as in RoF. It's also apparent that 1C/777 hoped or believed the unlocks would actually appeal to some players, likely including people used to 'grinding' from playing those 'other genres'. Like it or not, the BoS SP campaign approach - the unlocks, the pilot levels and awards and the lack of pilot and squadron identities - doesn't mean BoS can't deliver a solid, convincing air combat simulation experience. I find that BoS does exactly that, with considerable polish and flair in very many respects. Are the unlocks et al a show stopper for die hard fans of the combat flight sim genre? Your call, but not for me, absolutely not. The relatively recent tank sim, Steel Fury - Kharkov 1942 (SF) has no role-playing elements worthy of the name, in sad contrast to say, Panzer Elite. And SF's stock campaigns are just sets of scripted missions (with some replay variability), covering but a few weeks in May/June 1942 in a single area of operations. But once you've made a plan from the map, loaded the appropriate ammo and ordered your driver to advance, while the rounds begin to fall and the tracer starts to fly, the experience of playing the mission itself is actually very engaging. It puts you right there, leading a tank platoon into battle in a small-scale but reasonably convincing simulation of a WW2 all-arms, company-level operation. What SF does, it does more than sufficiently well, to pass muster as a top-notch tank sim, in my books and for many others. Despite limitations elsewhere. So let it be with Ceasar. Or said of BoS, in my view. Like SF, BoS lacks some features I would like to see, including some I consider quite important. Some of the features it does have, nicely implemented though they are, I'm not crazy about. However, for me, in the round, and judging first and foremost from the experience BoS delivers, upon release, of flying Eastern Front air combat in WW2 (as opposed to simply 'flying WW2 planes') this is a great new addition to the combat flight sim genre. We have a decent set of superbly-rendered aircraft (soon to be joined by an AI Ju 52) with a great feeling that you're actually flying or fighting from them. We have an historic battlefield rolled out before our very eyes, with adequate levels of ground activity, pleasing to the eyes and recreated in a depth and to a level of detail which more than compensates for the limited breadth of a single area of operations. We have the opportunity to fly small-scale but reasonably challenging and generally convincing sorties over this battlefield, as the battle itself unfolds, in its successive phases, where history, not the player's actions, determines the course of events. The air-to-air and air-to-ground action can be as visceral and exciting as any I've experienced. Sure, a little more suspension-of-disbelief-building in mission presentation (and less 'gamey' objectives and terminology) would be nice...but when you're up there in BoS, over that white-frozen but beautiful virtual landscape, in that nicely-rendered virtual cockpit, fighting for your virtual life while the war goes on around you, all other things seem somehow less important. Back down to earth, here are my pros and cons. Pros Beautifully-rendered aircraft, especially externally Great feeling of flying combat aircraft Beautiful (if snowbound!) environmentals Generally very good combat experience Good developer support & exceptional engagement Good aircrew animation Good planeset Good set of well-presented on-screen aids Ability to fly, gun or bomb 'Complex Engine Management' adds depth (if you want it) SP campaign follows the main phases of the historical battle Crisp, clean easy-to-use interface and high 'production values' Mostly, decent AI Mission Editor is opening up additional SP campaign possibilities Cons No real pilot persona or historical squadrons in stock campaign Unlocks could be handled in a more historical fashion (or opted out of) No padlock in campaign Edit - padlock IS now functioning in campaign, as of the pre-Christmas 2014 update Limited ground control/tower presence 'Gamey' terminology in some places Wingman command windows large and centred Near cloud effect interferes with aircraft rendering And since life's not all black-and-white, just to expand on the above assessment... Some room for improvement? In campaign, no ability to view your flight's results post-mission, just player's solo achievements Difficulty organising flight in making effective ground attacks Formations are sometimes small, even for the Eastern Front Aircraft could be visible further away, without icons/labels Formation-keeping - there's a certain amount of straggling Laden bombers seem a bit too agile Aircraft lack individual/unit markings Stock SP campaign mission briefings rather bland Landscape perhaps a little too bland, even for 'snowbound' Own pilot is invisible, in 1st person view Greater ability to fine-tune on-screen aids, within presets, would be useful Limited flexibility of graphics adjustment (presets) And the score? I make no allowance here for longer-term potential or the desirability of 'supporting a new product in a niche market'. Nor am I having any regard, either way, to any (sometimes rather fraught) discussions of, or opinions expressed about, BoS, elsewhere. However, I am making some allowance for: the fact that a manual is coming; the prospect of user-made campaign mission sets, which have already begun to appear; a facility to incorporate user-made 'skins' which is I believe coming; and the fact that an AI Ju 52 is definitely being produced, filling the big planeset gap. The mission editor is reported to be tricky to use and we may never get pilot logbooks; but sets of scripted missions, able at least to give the player an identity and an historical squadron, will likely see the arrival, over time, of a decent supply of at least adequate, and possibly very good, 'conventional' if not 'dynamic' Single Player campaigns, which will boost longevity. So, remembering that I'm rating only the Single Player element here, on this scale..... 5 - Must Buy - Delivers a consistently outstanding experience with minimal flaws that do not detract from the gameplay in any significant way. 4 - Highly Recommended - Delivers a fun and enjoyable experience well worth your time and money, despite some room for improvement. 3 - Recommended - Delivers a solid gameplay experience with a few irritations that occasionally disrupt enjoyment. 2 - Difficult to Recommend - Delivers some of the promised fun, but not without significant problems in the gameplay experience. 1- Not Recommended - Delivers a sub-par gameplay experience; doesn't fulfill its promises; offers more bugs than fun. ...this reviewer's final score is: 4 - Highly recommended As things stand, with a few non-critical reservations, I would recommend the new sim to any air war enthusiast and in particular, to those with an interest in the Eastern Front or in the Soviet or German warbirds which fought there. BoS should also appeal strongly to those who relish the extra realism of being able, if they choose, to manage their airscrew pitch, mixture, radiators and all the other stuff the real pilots had to handle. I have found IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad to be a detailed, well-produced, enjoyable, effective and rather beautiful evocation of the air war over and around one of the decisive battles of the Second World War. Which, I guess, is about what it set out to be. But - unlike the Stuka below - we're not quite finished here yet! Coming next - the view from the other reviewers' cockpits...including Multiplayer!

Thanks Harry. Glad if I can convey some of the incredible fun and immersion available to us from PC simulation in all of its many guises, free of the real hazards of being shot down, knocked out or lost with all hands!

The SP campaign 'tailpiece'...and BoS 'under the hood'... Having learned in the Lagg and sampled the Stuka, I decided to switch to the Soviets for the rest of Chapter 1, the pre-counterattack phase of BoS's campaign. I decided also to try a new aircraft, the Yak-1, reputed to be generally superior to the LaGG. All I had to do was click on an available Soviet airbase at the campaign 'Choose mission' screen. Operating from this base, I could fly all the available Soviet planes. See what I mean? They're all here, at this one little snowbound airbase, just east of the Volga: I'd have much preferred to enlist a virtual pilot in a named, historical squadron which operated from the airfield it used at that point in the campaign. This would not only be more realistic and immersive, it would let players see and learn something of the history of illustrious, real-life fighting units. However, the free-ranging BoS approach is certainly fast and flexible and will appeal to players who just want to be able to get straight to their preferred mount in a campaign-generated mission with the minimum of preliminaries. Flying the Yak, as before, the 'Select mission template' screen allowed me to choose ground or air starts and which of the available types of mission I flew. Ground attack was 'locked' and unavailable but strangely, bombing and 'ground support' whatever that is, were not locked but were greyed out, leaving me escorts or intercepts. The ability to choose from a set range of mission types, each time you fly a campaign mission, is reminiscent of the stock CFS3 campaigns and like the BoS aircraft selection approach, gives the player a degree of variety and freedom not usually found in SP campaigns. I had to start over 'grinding' again for extra kit and 'skins' for my new aircraft, though, which for the Yak comprises mainly bombs and rockets. The missions flown so far have been individually quite engaging, with apparently decent air-to-air AI (friendly and enemy) and some other flights going about their business. On the ground too, things may be happening, as you can see from the burning town to my eleven o'clock in this screenshot, taken as I approached the target area during an interception mission. Being spawned, you may miss these if you wander too far from your assigned track, which you have no particular reason to do. The standard diamond-shaped, 4-point flight plans are easy to follow and I think not un-realistic, ensuring that for obvious reasons you don’t come back in the way you went out, which I assume they teach in the air force, not just in the infantry. It seems definitely the case that mission goals, only you the player can achieve. In an intercept mission, if (as is often the case) the mission's goal is to damage at least two planes or destroy one, your wingmen can wipe the floor with the bad guys; but even if you led them there then cut them loose on the enemy with peerless tactics and admirable leadership, you're a failure as far as BoS is concerned. 'La Norvege, nul points' as they (usually) say in the Eurovision Song Contest. Really, BoS is mixing up the concepts of mission success and personal achievement, here. 'Under the hood' - Flight Models, Artificial Intelligence and Damage Models Having now seen them in action on campaign as well as in single missions, it's hard to explain but the control responses of the planes I've flown so far feel a bit 'squirrely', with some 'hunting', which I recall from Rise of Flight. Possibly this is just my well-worn Saitek Cyborg; maybe it's the effect some BoS players describe as 'rubber banding'. Whatever it is, it takes a certain amount of getting used to, as often when starting with a new sim. As I did in RoF, I end up taking snap shots as my sights pass throught my aiming point, rather than being able to keep it on my target...which worked reasonably well on RoF but with higher speeds and stressed-skin targets, my results are depressingly poorer in BoS, even with more powerful weaponry. Perhaps practice will make perfect. The mild but noticeable visual and audible buffet effect helps you avoid stalling out but when you do depart the envelope, spin recovery seems not unduly difficult. As a quick check I tried a few throttled-back stalls from level flight in the 109G and by the time I got to about textbook stall speed the plane had already settled into a nose-up sink earthwards, rather than dropping the nose. Continued stick back-pressure (in an effort to 'make something happen') eventually dropped a wing and spun me out ('spiralled me out' might be more accurate). It's a Gustav not a Cessna but that sink earthwards with no nose-drop felt a bit odd. Heinkels and Stukas with a bomb load seem a bit too agile, as well, tho not AI planes generally. Although they they reportedly use the same FMs as the player, maybe the BoS AI fly bombers at unladen weight or something, like they do with all planes in CFS3. Overall, I have to say that with their quirky ground handling; the facility to manage radiator settings, mixture and prop pitch if you want it; visible vibration effects inside those well-appointed cockpits; dynamic shadows; and Flight Models (squirrely or not) which make you feel like you are in charge of a powerful, dangerous machine which obeys the laws of aerodynamics and will respond to careful handling while punishing cack-handedness - the experience of flying and fighting in a WW2 aircraft in BoS is top notch, up there with or ahead of the very best. Here at least - one of the places it surely matters most - IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad is for me a worthy successor to Rise of Flight, and indeed to its illustrious namesake. Apart from the lack of padlock in campaign...'nuts' to that. EDIT, 28 December 2014 - as of the update released just before Christmas, padlock is now working in campaign! I would say the air-to-air AI feels better than RoF, less inclined to 'go low early', hang inverted for seconds at a time, or do 'the RoF wing waggle'. Not to the high standards of Battle of Britain 2's dog-fighting AI, but fairly human…as in, 'real life, no icons, real G-forces, scared and excited, training-goes-out-the-window' human; not 'video game player, know every trick in the game, nothing that happens here can hurt or kill me' human. Formation-keeping and ground attacking seem the relatively soft spots here. Damage modelling, my jury's still out on. Twice I've seen ailerons depart from my LaGG, once when it might have been Stuka return fire but the other time, when flying level and in the clear…if it was a stray, solitary flak round, it didn't seem to leave a mark elsewhere. After a forced landing, anything that's fallen off your machine will disappear before your very eyes after a few seconds, followed by your plane itself, dumping you out of the mission and cutting short any effort to use the view system to watch the action after you have crashed out. And I know German bombers during the Battle of Britain could soak up a lot of hits from .303 rounds but they seem way too resistant to heavier calibre stuff in BoS. Unfortunately, this Ju 87's 7.92mm rounds seem to have hurt me harder than my 12.7mm and 23mm rounds have hurt him. Maybe it's all about shot placement. My AI flight-mates seem to be better shots that I am, even attacking from dead astern...as the guys in this Heinkel found out, with only one managing to bail out. Unfortunately, I repeat, I get no credit whatsoever for a successful flight operation; in fact, the comrade who shot the wing of this German bomber robbed me of my only recognition, as it was the only aircraft in the sortie we had been sent up to intercept. Incidentally, fail a mission and you seem condemned to repeat it, as I think Santayana said about history and those who forget it. On the plus side, the repeated mission plays out differently each time, from what I've seen. Or you can just change the mission type altogether, eg from intercept to escort. Campaign conclusions If only BoS also had even RoF's beta career, or its campaign-themed mission sets, or best of all, Pat Wilson's campaign generator! Themed mission sets have begun to arrive, in the form of Veteran66's Bf 109 mini-campaign (too hot for my lowly system) and other forms of SP campaign may also appear at some point. Public release of the full mission builder/mission editor is likely a matter or weeks away and the developers have said they have undisclosed but firm plans to spice up the SP campaign experience, in the medium term. There seems to be a recognition that this, and an alternative to the unlocks for those who want to bypass them, must be contemplated. Meanwhile, we have what I've attempted to describe and illustrate here. The ability to choose aircraft and side as you go offers much greater flexibility in how you play through the campaign. And even if you rather resent having to do a moderate amount of 'grinding' to get at better 'skins' or mostly standard-issue weaponry, getting to the next Chapter provides a within-reach, intermediate target and incentive to keep playing. How many of us, even if we survive, regularly don't finish campaigns in other sims, for all their trimmings? Flying that 109 getting stale? Try the next mission in a Stuka. Fancy flying a tank, next time out? Take a Sturmovik for a thrash! Not my cup of tea but there's a certain amount to be said for the BoS approach. I haven't got onto later Chapters yet. I believe they differ mainly in that the different front lines and associated tactical situation dictate different target areas and to an extent, what those targets are - for example intercepting transports (quite legitimately, He 111s until the BoS Ju 52 arrives) during the air bridge phase. Variety isn't a strong point, without detailed mission briefings to set the tactical context that would help distinguish one air strike or intercept from another....although the missions do play out differently, with different targets and other flights. For me, the major selling point for the BoS SP campaign is left critically dependent on the richness (or otherwise) of the flying and air-fighting (or ground-pounding) experience which each mission delivers. If I must, I can do without the starter, the side order and the dessert; but having now sampled some more of it, is the main course good enough to keep me coming back for further servings, bowl in hand? Your mileage will vary, but for me, the answer is....revealed in Part 4. Anyhow, that's my take on BoS's Single Player campaign experience. If hunting humans is more your thing, I haven't 'classified' in MP, so the plan is, CowboyTodd will cover that in his contribution. Coming in part 4 - the (Single Player) verdict!

The campaign continues... As far as I recall, it's only when you kick off the first Chapter in the Single Player campaign, that you find out the first missions are in fact training. And similarly, it's only when you complete the training missions that you are told there were four of them. And that now it's 'for real', you must complete at least six successful operational missions before you can move on to the next campaign Chapter. They're called 'Regular' missions, as you can see below, yet another example of using a 'civvy' term when a military one is readily available and would have helped create 'that willing suspension of disbelief'...evidently, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wasn't on the BoS team. For the last couple of training missions, you can change sides, swapping your LaGG for a 109. By the time you are 'on ops', you can freely choose aircraft as well as side. To give you a flavour, here's how my first 'regular'/operational campaign mission went. Yes I know that this is supposed to be a review, not a mission report, but rather than me telling you what I think, I prefer mainly to describe how things look and play, so that you can see for yourself. And describing and illustrating a typical SP campaign mission is I think the best way of showing you, reasonably objectively, what BoS's SP campaign is actually like, to play. As with Quick Missions, you begin each campaign sortie by first choosing your starting point. I chose to fly from Gumrak airfield, in what would soon become the Stalingrad pocket, and after some hesitation, decided to try my hand with a Stuka. At the 'Select mission template' screen which comes next, I chose a 'Full' duration (ground start) and accepted the default 'Ground attack' mission type - for a Stuka I'm not sure what if anything would have been different had I chosen instead a 'Ground support' or 'Bombing' mission. Anyway here's the mission I was allocated: to destroy some artillery positions, up to the north-west. It's a good idea to pay particular attention to the position of the front lines on this map because once you're on your way, neither of the maps you can use during the mission (full screen briefing map or mini-map) show the front. I know this isn't World War One but even if the 'FEBA' is apt to move about, it's good to have some idea roughly where it might be, don't you think? Also as in Quick Missions, it's only when you load the mission itself, that you get to see the briefing map and can check your route and read the detailed briefing. I say 'detailed' but while there is some useful info - like your mission height, legs and bearings - you are not told what your strength (formation size) is nor is there any description of the tactical situation. Likewise you are not treated to any exhortations from your CO or other personal or suspension of disbelief-building touches. Another point worth noting here is that the mission route follows the same fixed diamond pattern - a takeoff point, an initial/ingress waypoint, an 'Action point' ('Objective' or 'Target area' would have sounded more military/less 'gamey'), an exit/egress waypoint and your airfield starting point. If you select a 'Short' duration you can skip the legs to and from your base but otherwise, this simple pattern seems used for all campaign missions, with no ability to drag waypoints about. It's a little repetitive but no worse than many other sims. I haven't unlocked anything for the Stuka so I'm stuck with the default loadout, a fairly standard 250 Kg bomb under the belly and two 50 Kg bombs under each wing. A siren is one of the 'unlocks', incidentally! I did have the option to set fuse delay and chose 5 seconds...just in case. Having started the mission, I found that I'm leading a kette of three Ju 87s; as far as I know so far, you're never a wingman in BoS, which is absolutely fine by me. It's nice that your flight takes off with you, instead of the rather awful IL-2 conga line. Both my wingmen are in temporary winter finish but not me. In campaign, the BoS airfields seem slightly livelier, though somebody should have told the fellow with the searchlight that his watch is very fast and that dusk is many hours away. Maybe he's been a naughty boy and earned the displeasure of der Speiss! The BoS Stuka sounds great and is a joy to behold, inside and out. Once I've 'earned' sufficient points I'll be able to use a 'skin' with proper unit markings; but first, I have to get some successful missions under my belt. On this mission we had a couple of Gustavs for escort. Glad of their company, I decided to overlook the fact that they were not mentioned in the briefing. The jaeger zig-zagged protectively above and behind us, at a respectful distance. My two wing-men took a long time to catch up and while I had the labels turned on to check their range, with the mini-map and on-screen instruments or HUD turned off, I got my first inkling that all was not well. Red labels, even slightly greyed out at distance, indicated the VVS had showed up. A short flurry of traffic on the radio told me a friendly fighter patrol - not our escort, as it turned out - was getting stuck into the Ivans and before long I could make out a distant dogfight, with one of the victims going down, leaving a dark greasy stain on the blue sky. Apart from some very inaccurate flak, the rest of the trip to the objective, at my assigned height of around 2500 metres, was uneventful. Low cloud obscured the target and I resorted to turning on the icons briefly, to identify it. Give me a break will you, I'm new to this sim!!! I rolled back the little targeting window in the floor of my Stuka but it didn't help much. So I ordered my flight to attack independently, via the 'Attack nearest ground target' wingman command and, hoping for the best, overflew the target area. Losing a bit of height so as to maintain a line of sight despite the clouds, I came back for another run. This is where unfamiliar keys and drills - and in the absence of a manual, I haven't discovered if the BoS Stuka has an automatic pull-out - got the better for me. Finger co-ordination broke down and I messed up the 2-key combo for dropping my dive brakes, dropping most of my bombs instead! By the time I got it right, it was time to pull up and though I let go my last two 50 Kg bombs as I did so, it was too late. I succeeded only in cratering an adjoining field. My wingmen I had last seen swinging off somewhere to the east. Hoping it was a case with them of 'reculer pour mieux sauter', I decided to come back in at low level and have a crack at the enemy gun positions with my wing-mounted MGs. It wasn't until I started shooting that I realised that my targets were not artillery pieces, but tanks, and thick-skinned tanks at that...KV-1s in fact. They were in revetments, so a mistake would have been understandable. I also noticed as I whizzed past that one of the Soviet emplacements held not a tank but a truck. This I first took to be a Katyusha rocket launcher, but I quickly realised that it was actually a truck-mounted multiple AA machine gun! Looking over my shoulder as I came off the target, I suddenly realised that my two flight-mates - who had lagged behind quite a bit, on the way in - had picked this perfect moment to rejoin formation, flying straight across the field of fire of the Soviet AA weapon. My suspicion that they had ignored my earlier ground attack command was well founded, for they still carried their full complement of bombs. Sure enough, one of my wingmen copped the proverbial packet. So far, this was all going rather badly. This made it personal, so I broke all the rules and made a second firing pass at a fully-alerted target, going for the MG truck. I don't think I destroyed it but I certainly gave the gunners a good fright, if nothing else. That made me feel better. On the way home, the Ivans tried to level the score with some medium and light flak, but we both made it through. You may have noticed that I'd forgotten to raise my dive brakes, though it didn't seem to make much difference, except that on the way home, after correcting my mistake, my aircraft was a bit wobbly, like I had damaged something. By the time we got back to Gumrak, my surviving wingman had caught up. I hadn't felt like getting him shot down, too, by ordering him to attack again, so he brought his bombs home. As I headed for the circuit I ordered him to 'wait here' so as to stay out of my way; which order, this time, he sensibly obeyed. In campaign, airfields are definitely a little busier than in quick missions. Apart from Searchlight Guy, who was still on the job, there were various other greatcoated and muffled German soldiers walking or standing about (albeit wearing Army rather than Luftwaffe issue) and some revetments had aircraft parked in them. So, there you have a typical BoS SP campaign mission. The 'diamond' flight patterns are pretty well standard, and the briefings, brief. The debriefings are pretty well non-existent, just the same sequence of mission results screens, in this case confirming that my successful landing meant I got 100% of the zero 'experience points' I had won, for getting no kills. I believe that it's purely the player's success that's measured here - had my flight in fact pounded the target into powder, I would have been notified only of my own results, in terms of kills and points. In-mission, my wingman formation-keeping was a bit suspect with a good deal of straggling and their ability to hit ground targets on request, more so. Perhaps a different command to 'Attack nearest ground targets' was what was required, which seems unlikely. Especially as other players report similar problems, getting their flight to pound the ground. Another negative is that - while in Quick Missions you can padlock ground and air targets - for some bizzare reason there is no padlock in campaign. Spare me lectures on the alleged unreality of padlock, which pales besides many other unrealities built into video gaming in all its forms. Granted the BoS padlock is too infallible but its complete absence in campaign is inexcusable. Back to hatswitch and mouselook for this non-head-tracker user, then. On the positive side, the Stuka is a treat to fly and whether or not there is an automatic dive recovery facility, I think learning to dive bomb in BoS, even without Complex Engine Management, will be fun. While overall numbers in this mission were small, there were at least two other flights operating in the area, besides mine and our escort. I just wish I could get my flight-mates to contribute, even if I will never know their names or be privy to the details of their successes and failures. Even sims which trouble to name your wingmen aren't necessarily much better than BoS at making you feel much of a connection with them. But it would be good to have a better sense that you were actually commanding a small team whose combined efforts, directed by you the player, signified success or failure. So yes it's like they say, the BoS SP campaign missions are repetitive and though you're the flight leader, you're very much the main man in this show. But if you were flying a Stuka over Stalingrad, day in, day out, what would you really expect to be doing, rescuing Stuka Girl from the besieged city, perhaps? Even so, after that you'd likely be back to bombing the usual suspects. And the BoS experience of flying and bombing is - for me anyway - engaging enough to make it interesting and a challenge. Heck, I may even take up Complex Engine Management, as a substitute for worrying overmuch about my little flock. Longevity, and better briefings, will doubtless come with the release of the full mission builder/mission editor and perhaps in due course, the sort of campaigns that have proved possible in Rise of Flight.. ...to be continued!

The Single Player campaign The SP campaign is nicely tied into the historical battle. When you kick it off, you get a campaign selection screen; this lists only Stalingrad but the fact there is such a screen suggests other campaigns could be added later. Having selected the campaign itself, you get this screen. From it, you can see that BoS divides the battle into 'Chapters' (which though not totally sequential, historically, could have been more militarily termed 'phases'). You must make a certain amount of progress in each Chapter, before you can move on to the next. However, you can continue to fly missions in completed chapters, even after you have moved on. Each Chapter has an introductory video. These consist of an historical summary narrated as a voiceover to a highly-stylised animated representation. I'd have preferred the more conventional historical newsreels here, but hey, you can't please everybody. Having started the Chapter 'Prelude to Counter-Offensive', you're invited to 'Choose [a] mission' from a map which shows that the 6th Army has pushed a salient into the Soviet lines, occupying all but the eastern fringes of Stalingrad itself. This corresponds to the operational situation just before 6th Army was trapped in the city by Operation Uranus. The attention to the historical detail here I find most immersive. Even if, like me, you're not a particular student of operations on the Eastern Front, to see a well-researched map with the positions of each side's armies and divisions marked out helps draw you back in time, as you look at an authentic military representation of the battlefield at the start of a momentous campaign. You're prompted to click on an airbase, to begin. But most bases are either inactive map markers or greyed out. In fact, at this point, you're in training, and you can only start at one airfield, flying one type of plane, and on one type of mission. Click on the only 'unlocked' airfield - Rakhinka - and all is revealed, step by step. Your aircraft is a LaGG-3, a neat but somewhat underpowered Soviet machine which realised its full potential only when given a big radial, becoming the La-5. Below is the campaign 'Select mission template' screen, illustrating the different options and the range of available campaign missions. Let's run through the options, starting with 'Duration'. A 'Short' mission - note the clock icon - is an air start, requiring you only to fly from a starting or entry waypoint, on to the mission objective area, and then to a finish or egress waypoint. A 'Full' mission includes the same basic sequence but starts you on the airfield, requiring you to fly to the entry waypoint and from the egress waypoint, fly back to the airfield and land. You get fewer 'experience points' for flying 'Short' missions, incidentally. The 'Difficulty' options enables you to have, or to dispense with, Complex Engine Management and in-flight markers or aids - though in 'Normal' mode, which was my choice, you can hide these visual aids, in-game. Below that, you can see the types of mission available. For your very first sortie, you are restricted to a 'Short' (air start) duration and have only to fly two legs, from entry waypoint to objective waypoint, and then from objective waypoint to egress waypoint. You only find out that this is a training mission when you start it and after the mission has loaded, see the full mission 'Briefing' map, as in this one: Here's a shot taken in-mission, with the visual aids turned on. It's nice to see that my LaGG now has a winter scheme, with moderately-weathered temporary 'whitewash' finish. I'll now run through all the mission result screens you get, when you complete this first, simple mission. I'm devoting all this space to these screens because they neatly illustrate just how the Single Player campaign progression/unlocks/experience points thing works, in practice. First, you get this, which is self-explanatory... ...then come these screens, showing you how many 'experience points' you have been awarded and how far you are, on your way to the next 'Level' of pilot... Next comes this, telling you that your 'EXP' has unlocked some goodies, in this case a 23mm cannon: Even though you haven't made 'Level 2 pilot' yet, mission completion has earned you a 'Young Pilot Certificate', which I'm sure is fictitious but sounds corny enough to have been real in the 'socialist paradise' that was the 1940's USSR. Finally, here's the mission results summary. I believe the 'In service' factor is a modifier, in this case giving me 100% of the earned points as I'm still 'In service' - alive and un-hospitalised as the conclusion of the mission, at a guess. What can I say? Not a pilot persona in sight; no option to join an historical squadron; no logbook. Not quite what most of us would expect from a combat flight sim, what with pilot 'levels' and unlocking stuff. CFS3 awarded not-dissimilar 'prestige points' which affected some pilot skills but at least there were no unlocks (apart from new planes arriving on their service entry dates) and you had a pilot persona, although you could not directly choose his squadron and the campaign itself was in an alternative WW2 universe where German shipping sailed the English Channel in daylight. This isn't what I'd have preferred and I hope that we will at some point get something like a Rise of Flight-style 'beta Career' and/or a Pat Wilson-style campaign generator. At the very least, I think we can certainly expect a more conventional approach from themed sets of single missions, built using the upcoming Full Mission Builder, so far just open to a few but at some point, to be on general release. I have to say that - unconventional though it is - I find the current BoS approach is in most respects both neatly designed and well executed. For example, the 'Select mission template' screen is liberally provided with on-screen tips, which guide you through the setup process. I'm not saying I like it, mind, but I can't help but admire the execution. Some players may actually favor the radical BoS take on delivering a Single Player campaign experience. It did actually get some votes in a developer poll, though many more wanted it either taken away or made by-passable. Anyway...subsequent training missions expand your repertoire, taking you on ground attack and intercept sorties and introducing full duration, ground start missions. Like beating up this convoy of Open Blitz trucks, complete with Hollywood-style German crosses on the doors. This driver made a run for it but he'll be needing a new truck, as well as a change of underwear, most likely. ...to be continued!

The environment, the options and Quick Missions The BoS 'map' covers what you'd expect - Stalingrad itself and a large swathe of the area around it, especially to the west, where the Soviet pincers struck. You can see the area covered by the map in the Quick Mission setup screen below. Stalingrad itself is centre right, in the great bend of the River Volga. The ground left of that is the area between the bends in the Volga and the Don, where the Soviet counterattacks came in. First in late November 1942 was Operation Uranus, when attacks from north and south trapped 6th Army. Then in mid-December, Operation Little Saturn, an even bigger pincer attack further to the west, threatened to destroy the whole German Army Group in the south. There's only one seasonal variation - snowbound/frozen in, which suits the later part of the battle, from about the time of the Soviet counterstrokes. The snowbound look is well done though a bit pristine. The overall effect is extremely bland and an autumnal variation would be very welcome. The city itself I find quite well done, complete with plumes of smoke from major fires. The ruins are a bit two-dimensional but maybe that's what we should we expect from ruined buildings, with the rubble itself covered by...you guessed it, snow. Here's how Stalingrad itself looks on the map, zoomed in. To the west of the city you can see the airfields of Gumrak and Pitomnik, which were the main bases for landing supplies and evacuating the wounded from the pocket, after Stalingrad was surrounded. This screenshot is from the in-flight, full-screen version of the mission map. If you compare BoS's Stalingrad 'in game' with battle maps or wartime aerial photographs, you can pick out most or all of the main landmarks in BoS, like the big factories such as the Barrikady, the heights immediately west of central Stalingrad at Mamayev Kurgan, Tsaritsa Gorge and the 'tennis racquet' railway loop around the Lazur plant, as seen below, 'in game' and for real. If anything, the real place looks more bland than the sim version at the point the recce photo was snapped, by which time the site appears to have been basically leveled and perhaps the rubble cleared. The bluffs on the western bank of the Volga, which provided some shelter in dead ground for the last pockets of Soviet defenders as the Germans closed in, are also well represented. Incidentally, the current edition of 'After the Battle' magazine, issue 166, is a 'special' on Stalingrad with lots of 'then and now' photos and a good annotated map of the city. BoS's airfields are a bit sparsely endowed with ground objects (my medium settings may not help here!) but the more famous landing grounds appear to be there, with many others. The generally snowbound look - even the rivers are frozen - makes it quite difficult to pick up landmarks, though perhaps that is, again, more or less what we should expect for the barren steppes of southern Russia in the winter of 1942-43. In fact, BoS already includes two additional, smaller maps, which are usable in Quick Missions. Both feature snowbound, Eastern Front terrain. First there's Novosokolniki, which Google tells me is near Leningrad/St Petersburg, and is rather more wooded than the Stalingrad area: The other map is called Lapino. I believe the map is a fictional one, representing 'somewhere in the Soviet Union', though there appear to be several places called Lapino in Russia, including just west of Moscow. Settings, options and performance Here's main menu again, listing the top-level options available. If you start BoS offline, without connecting to the 'net, the options for Campaign and Multiplayer are not displayed. I like the design of the BoS menu system; it's modern, clear and crisp. From the Graphics sub-option, you are presented with four graphics presets - Ultra, High, Balanced and Low. You don't have the ability (as in RoF, for example) to tweak features individually. This has provoked some complaints but I don't find it an issue. To be honest, I didn't notice a big visual difference between 'Balanced' and 'Ultra', except that the ground objects appeared to be rendered in detail further out. But that's based on a brief foray, with the FPS hit quickly quelling my curiosity. Performance at 'Balanced' on my 2.33 Ghz Quad Core and 1Gb 250 GTS is acceptable, but for a bit of a slow-down flying through or very close to the big plumes of smoke usually seen at Stalingrad. BoS allows reassignment of keyboard and joystick button commands via an interface similar to Rise of Flight's. However, unless I've missed it, you can't set up 'response curves' to fine tune your joystick, the way you could in the earlier sim. Quick Missions If you select 'Quick Mission', you get a setup screen very much like RoF's, enabling you to choose your aircraft, numbers, skill levels, location, time of day, starting height, weather and enemies (or none, for a 'free flight' option). This is where you may first encounter the difficulty/realism presets: three of them, 'Normal', 'Expert' and 'Custom'. I fly in the latter mode as I don't care for the 'Complex Engine Management' that seems to be the main feature of 'Expert' mode but don't want all the elements of 'Normal'. Here's what you can tinker with, if you chose the 'Custom' difficulty option. As with RoF, 'Allow spectators' is the quaint term for permitting an external view. Here I am in the Yak-1 with some of the visual aids turned on, via the 'Custom' option; and third down, in the 109F, with the 'minimap' zoomed in. You can clear the screen of all this at the press of a single key ('H') and have the 'minimap' itself, on or off, zoomed in or out ('M' key cycles through modes). From what I've seen when using the icons - and assuming distances are in metres even though my 'HUD' instrument display is in Imperial units - even against a clear sky background, fighters aren't visible at much over 5 kilometres, which is rather close. I don't know if aircraft visibility/rendering distances are affected by graphics presets. If they are, then this is a setting that it would be good to be able to tweak, outside of the presets. The 'O' key will bring up a full screen briefing with (non-mini-) map - as seen in the screenshot below. This is actually taken from one of the included 'pre-built' missions, not a Quick Mission. My task here is to lead another 109, escorting six Stukas from Pitomnik in an attack up on the north-eastern perimeter of the pocket. You can clear the text briefing panel from the map, for a clearer view. Quick Missions is where you may also first come across the 'unlocks' which have generated much of the controversy surrounding BoS's release. For each plane, there are loadout options, plus some extra 'skins', all displayed with a 'locked' symbol. The 'skins' and equipment options for the 109G2 are shown in the pics below. Some of these 'skins' are from other fronts or theatres of war. At least the 'skins' - when you can get at them - have the unit and individual markings that the standard ones lack. I gather than BoS doesn't support IL-2-style 'decals' to give different planes in your flight different numbers, squadron codes or other distinctive markings. Neither skins nor the equipment options - like 20mm underwing gunpods for the Gustav above - can be selected, until you have 'earned' them by gaining 'experience points' (XP). You can gain XP only through flying - and achieving pre-set minimum mission goals in - the Single Player campaign - even to unlock stuff for Quick Missions or Multiplayer! This approach may be what the developers had in mind, when they referred in the release announcement to incorporating 'the best features of other genres'. But - I think predictably - this has proved unpopular with players - myself included. MP folk in particular fail to see why they should have to play through much of the SP campaign, to be able to access these features. The concept of additional stores or weapons being in limited supply, or better pilots being given certain types of better kit (or a choice thereof) first, isn't inherently bad. And as the developers have said, the kit itself is basically historical, rather than the likes of 'power ups' (though the twin 3.7cm cannon 'unlock' for the Stuka, trials aircraft apart, is I think a bit too soon for Stalingrad). But the method of 'earning' this stuff - especially combined with the 'arcade game' terminology used - feels rather out of place in 'proper' air combat sim. It has certainly generated a good deal of criticism, some of it rather hostile. We can but hope that there will be some changes here! One thing you'll want to get the hang of in Quick Missions is the radio menus. There is no real interaction with ground controllers, apart from some seemingly event-triggered set pieces. So the radio option comes into play when you're a flight leader. You can make various pilot gestures, a leftover from RoF which the developers acknowledge isn't much, if any, use. Here are examples of the wingman (radio) commands available to you. We'll cover how well they're followed later, when considering the BoS AI. I think these win the prize for the biggest, most conspicuous wingman command menus in any sim I have played. Happily, you can assign hotkeys to wingman commands. For example I have set the 'H' key, familiar from CFS2 and 3 as 'Help me!', to issue the command 'Cover me!' which (I am hoping!) will elicit a broadly similar response. There is also a set of useful commands for air gunners, for those planes which have them. In Quick Missions, as in RoF, while at the mission setup screen or while flying, you have some control over displaying or suppressing on-screen visual aids like labels, waypoint markers, sim messages, gauges and what's displayed on the in-flight 'minimap'. This gives you the ability to vary the difficulty 'presets' for a Quick (or user-made single) Mission. There's an eight-a-side limit in Quick Missions, which is not too bad for the Eastern Front. Reading pilot memoirs like those of Norbert Hannig of II/JG54, it's fairly clear that fighters at least often operated in fours or even pairs. Anyway, Quick Missions is where you can get your 'quick fix' of Luftwaffe -vs- VVS action. Like this effort - four Gustavs chasing three Pe-2 twin-engined light bombers. Not being into head trackers and using the padlock, I find the latter too infallible, able to track targets hidden by my airframe or clouds. Still, rather that, than no padlock at all. As in original Il-2, my wingmen needed no bidding to go for the bad guys, which is just as well as I'm still getting the hang of the flight commands. I'm seeing an odd visual effect where aircraft in or near clouds have their outlines a bit 'broken', as you can see from the trailing 109s in this shot. Apparently this is a known issue, said to be related to the way clouds are rendered. I was keen to find out if BoS's AI gunners are as dangerous as some say, if you give them an easy shot by attacking from the rear...which is precisely what my AI flightmates did, sad to say. So far, presented with such targets, the gunners have proved quite good shots, though perhaps not as much so, as the original sim. And my planes, though far from bullet-proof, aren't showing signs of 'glass engines' or anything massively odd, damage model wise. Unlike in original IL-2, where seemingly magic bullets would pierce (or spin around or underneath?) my Gustav's armourglass windshield and knock askew my Revi gunsight, with depressing predictability. After I broke up from my own firing pass, having taken some hits - notice the glycol vapour streaming from my port radiator and the holes in the starboard upper mainplane - my right undercarriage unit promptly fell out of the well. Fortunately, I didn't need it. If there's an emergency jettison key to dump the canopy on the 109 - as opposed to doing that and jumping out, or just hinging it open sideways - I couldn't find it. So I had to take my chances on the thing not jamming shut, when I hit the deck. Luckily, there was no fire. Maybe all that snow isn't such a bad thing, after all. Most of my flight fared no better, I have to say, like this fellow, who hit the silk. The AI gunners, like their immediate forebears in RoF, like to sit comfortably until the very last minute, before manning their weapons. As with the rear gunner in this Pe-2. He's sitting quietly facing sideways, despite the fact that his comrade below, in the ventral position, is already in action against the enemies coming up from behind, as you can see from the trail of spent cases. Come on, Tovaritch, buck up your ideas, before you get a cannon shell in your lap!!! At least the ventral gunner in the Pe above and ahead is also on the ball, having opened his little 'trapdoor' under the fuselage and generally standing by to repel boarders. Unless I'm missing something, there is no Quick Mission debrief to present the results, though the ability, while you're in the game, to tab around other aircraft is useful. The Pe which I attacked was smoking steadily and the other two were both holed. But I think they got three of us. I reckon that maybe I made the mistake of leaving the friendly skill level at 'Novice' when generating the mission; anyway, I trust that the BoS AI at higher settings can do better than attack from dead astern, otherwise it's going to get pretty bloody, pretty quickly. There is also a set of pre-built missions available, accessed from the main menu's 'Missions' tab strangely enough. Below, you can see most of them listed. I believe these were made by some Early Access guys using BoS's 'Full Mission Builder', which isn't on general release yet. The 'Flight Records' main menu option is where you manage the 'tracks' you have recorded during missions. So, now we come to the feature which will be the beating the heart of the sim, for many players. …coming in part 3 - the Single Player campaign!

Update, Friday 27 November - per the latest developer blog, the AI Ju-52 is now being worked on (no ETA yet); and the first user-made campaign, from Veteran66, has now appeared. BoS furum member Blooddawn reports it's an exciting 8-mission mini-campaign with lots of ground activity. Part 2 of this review will follow very soon.

Hi Falcon no announcements yet but they have said an AI Ju52 is possible (and somebody found a skin for a possible ground object Ju52 in a recent patch, so maybe that is close) and some modders are working on some more (eastern front, snowbound) maps. If BoS is successful I would be very surprised if we don't get DLC planes and the official forums has several polls started by players trying to test the demand for new planes and thus persuade the developers to release them. I would love a G-6 and a 110F or G too. You'll know that the G-2 available now isn't much different to the G-6 apart from those cowl bulges and 13.1mm instead of 7.92mm MGs. A 'kanonenboot' with 20mm MG151/20s in underwing 'gondolas' is one of the G-2 options in BoS, useful for taking down those Sturmovik Zementbomber, though I haven't got to try these out yet...