Look, a flying turd.

User Rating: 3.5 | IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey PS3
It's not often that I am harsh with a game, but when it's one that has got favourable reviews and of a genre that I love, it really ticks me off that when I aquire the game, it is really, really crap. This is the case with Il-2 Sturmovik. It just plain sucks. Here's the rundown:

There are 3 difficulty settings that you have to unlock in training missions before you are able to play the campaign mode, arcade, realistic and simulation. It all sounds good until you actually unlock them. The only one that is actually playable is arcade because realistic is only just playable and simulation is impossible. This wouldn't be so bad if only the arcade setting provided some decent gameplay, but it's just a repetetive boring mess.

The controls are some of the worst I have encountered in this type of game with no way to manually configure them, so you have to suffer with many commands being assigned to the right stick, which makes any sort of dogfighting extremely tedious especially on realistic (forget about simulation with a Dualshock, it's not happening) which in my opinion is inexplicable and unacceptable. Did they not test this game? Could none of them realise that the control scheme sucked, or was it designed around a joystick? Either way, it sucks and I'm not going to go out and buy an expensive joystick to find out if it gets any better.

The missions are slightly awkward as the radar doesn't work that well, especially for ground targets and trying to hit something can become frustrating at times whilst at the same time battling with the framerate and the horrid controls. They want you to use the look around command but it's just so badly implemented having to press R3 and keep it pressed looking around, whilst trying to control the rudder and the throttle at the same time is just so bloody annoying.

The only good thing about this game are the graphics and the sound effects.

Utter crap.