Pre-WWI naval sims:
Ironclads: American Civil War: Cruise around the east coast of the US or up the Mississippi in your Ironclad and blaze away with cannon at the dirty Rebs or Yanke carpetbaggers. This is a fleet command game so it's played from a birds-eye view. The AI will slap you silly. Very nicely detailed ships but no weather or land.
Ironclads: High Seas: Hypothetical American Civil War era game which sees the Confederacy buying a blue water navy and fighting the Union out on the open seas in an effort to control the trade routes to Europe.
Ironclads: Schleswig War 1864. Naval conflict between Denmark and Prussia sees Denmark attempt to blockade Prussia in an attempt to disrupt the Prussian army's advance into Schleswig.
Distant Guns: Naval battles between Czarist Russia and Japan in 1905. Decent graphics and meticulously researched and modelled ships but the DRM is annyoing.
WWI flight sims:
Over Flanders Fields: Between Heaven and Hell. Truly amazing full conversion mod for CFS3. Good dynamic campaign and amazing level of historical detail plus a tonne of flyable aircraft. Flight and damage models aren't as robust as other sims, but the immersion factor is great. Play this one if you want to know what flying in WWI would have been like.
Rise of Flight. Pretty much the inverse of Flanders Fields. Amazing flight models, wonderful physics and damage models and some first rate graphics (although you can only use 4x FSAA max so you can get jaggies) but the campaigns are poorly done and there's almost no immersion. Great flight sim, so-so war sim. Play this one if you want to know what flying a WWI era plane would have been like.
First Eagles 2. Open source game from the creator of European Air War. Out of the box, it's kind of limited, but the open source nature means that there are hundreds of user made add ons ranging from new planes and new paint schemes to entire campaigns with freakin' flyable zepplins!
WWI naval sims:
Jutland: Epic battle between the dreadnaughts of Great Britain and Germany in 1916. Uses an updated version of the Distant Guns engine. Again, great detail is paid to the ship modelling but the DRM is still annoying as hell.
1914-Shells of Fury. Command a U-boat for the Germany navy during WWI. It's interesting because it covers an era that no other naval sim does, but the graphics look very, very dated. If graphics are important to you, avoid this one. If you can get past the pixellated sea, there's a pretty interesting game under the hood.
WWII tank sims:
T-34 vs. Tiger: Very nice looking tank sim covering two of the most iconic tanks of the Eastern Front. Each tank is meticulously detailed and you can hop between all the crew positions. Damage modelling seems somewhat limited in this sim, especially since other aspects seem so thoroughly modelled. AI is decent but the campaigns are scripted and there are only a few missions for each side. There is multiplayer, but I've never tried it.
Steel Fury-Kharkov 1942. Another eastern front WWII tank sim. This one offers up more vehicles than T-34 vs Tiger. Graphically, it's not quite as nice as T-34, but it's superior in every other aspect. THe tutorials will drive you nuts though. Driving a T-34 up a long incline takes forever!
WWII Online. Offers up a wide variety of different armoured vehicles to go tooling around in. It's nowhere near as detailed as the two above-mentioned pure tank sims, but it does let you crew a tank with your buddies and rumble about, annoying the other side. Good times!
WWII naval sims:
Silent Hunter III Get the Grey Wolves X mod and you've got yourself pretty much the ultimate U-boat sim.
Silent Hunter IVGet the Trigger Maru mod and you've got yourself pretty much the best Pacific theatre sub sim. Not as good as SHIII, but still a great game.
Silent Hunter V Uhhhh....well.....it sure looks pretty. Hold off until it's been patched and modded to a better state. And hope that UBI will remove their stupid DRM scheme.
PT Boats: Knights of the Sea. Interesting game but leans a bit too much towards the arcade end of the spectrum for my tastes. Very nice looking though.
WWII Online. Not much of a naval component to this sim, but you can command a few smaller destroyers or gunboats, cruise the coastline and rivers and make things go boom. Good times!
WWII Air sims:
IL-2: 1946. As already mentioned several times, this is pretty much the gold standard of WWII flight sims. Tonnes of flyable planes and still a very active and robust online community. Single player is a bit lacking in that the campaigns are not very well done but the flight models are fantastic.
Battle of Britain II: Wings of Victory. Single player only and is actually a turn based wargame with a flight sim component. Fantastic attention to detail and still some of the best weather and explosion effects out there. Air battles with several hundred planes onscreen are something to behold. My only real gripe with the game is that you can't follow the career path of a single pilot.
IL-2 Wings of Prey. Sim-lite. Amazing landscapes and some great lighting effects but the game was designed for consoles and the twitch crowd. While you can change the settings to sim mode, the mission objectives are left unchanged so you get ridiculous situations where you, in a Mustang, are supposed to fight off 16 Bf-109s and destroy 32 tanks on the ground.
WWII Online. Again, not as robust as the pure WWII flight sims due to simplified controls and avionics (and a poor draw distance) but good fun to join up with some friends and go shoot up the bad guys.
Combat Flight Sim 3: Meh.... some good mods though. Check out the Firepower mods from A2A sims, makers of Battle of Britain II.
WWII Infantry/combined arms combat
WWII Online. Infantry combat is where this game excels. Vast maps leads to some very tense moments right before a firefight kicks off. (Nobody wants to be that guy...the one in Pvt Ryan who stepped off the landing craft only to get a round between the eyes. Nothing like slogging across country for 20 minutes only to die in the opening moments of a firefight. Still, that's what makes this game unique.)
Red Orchestra. Smaller maps than WWII Online and greatly simplified vehicles, but still a pretty fun "casual" sim. Some great mods out there like Mare Nostrum which covers Africa and Italy and Darkest Hour which covers the western front.
Hidden and Dangerous 2. It's old but it's still awesome. Command a squad of 4 SAS troopers as they fight their way from Norway to Burma and all points in between.
Death to Spies. Interesting mix of Stealth and FPS. You play as a Soviet SMERSH agent during WWII. You'll be engaged in such wholesome activities such as assassination, sabotague, theft, terror, and brutality. Psst...buddy, does this rag smell like chloroform to you?
I'm out of time for now so I'll post the post WWII stuff later.
Log in to comment