Prague 'N Play

In July, 1C Company invited us along to the tallest building in Prague for us to take a sneak peak at two of their upcoming titles: IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad and Ilya Muromets.

Once the presentation was underway, we were informed that 1C were hoping to bring the flight simulator genre to a whole new level, pun intended. It’s no secret that IL-2 Sturmovik games are considered the best in their genre by the industry; but this means that they've set the bar pretty high for themselves. We were intrigued to find out how they planned on soaring over that bar. Okay, I’ll stop with the bad puns now.

We were then told that they have taken a new approach to the design and development of the game. This consists of three stages: challenges, emotion and flexibility. The developers wanted IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad to be a lot more like a simulation and to make the player feel like they were actually flying. To help achieve this, 1C Games Studio, the development arm of the company, have been working on the AI within the games to be more realistic and act more like a human pilot, and tried to make everything as close to realistic as possible. Everything from the weather, to the interior of the plane has been improved in this latest iteration of the series. They have also introduced PvP elements to make the game overall more exciting.

To help with the design of the game, 1C uncovered old Soviet archives and studied the blueprints of each of the planes to help improve the authenticity. Not only this, but they also got a veteran from the Battle of Stalingrad to join them in the development process, play testing the newest title to make sure everything felt right.

Whilst the development team have been working to create a much more engaging experience, they have never forgotten that not everyone is a professional pilot looking for the most authentic feeling. Because of this, they've included a lot of flexibility options such as the choice between Keyboard, Controller or Joystick control schemes and difficulty settings which can be customised to fit the players desires.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad

Usually, we would jump straight ahead of the main menu and the settings and head straight for the gameplay, however; being the hyper-realistic game that it is, we had to go and tweak some of the controls and game settings to make sure the experience was an enjoyable one and not just us grasping a joystick for half an hour, trying not to plummet to the soil.

Once we’d got everything set up, we hopped into a game, choosing the time of day, weather and spawn location. Here’s a tip: don’t play your first game of IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad at night. Just, trust us on that one. Not only can you not admire the graphical prowess that the game shows, but you can’t tell which way is up without looking at the dials within the plane. To cut a long story short, we killed a pilot.

On the second attempt, we chose some slightly more friendly settings and chose to spawn in-flight, rather than on the ground. This made it a lot easier to get the hang of all the controls without worrying about being stopped before.

I have to praise the level of detail that 1C have put into this game. Everything felt flawless. Not only was everything within the plane detailed to the nth degree, the scenery was magnificent too. A particular highlight for us was when we were flying over a river and we looked down, expecting to see a lump of blue but instead, we wondered at the water glistening beneath us. Let’s not mention the part where we was too distracted by the environment and went headlong into a mountain side.

So besides from the great control scheme and aesthetically pleasing surroundings, IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad is also historically accurate. 1C boast that the player can learn the history of the Battle of Stalingrad simply by playing through the game. You learn this all through the missions within the game, of which there are two types: long and short. The short missions take roughly 30 minutes to complete and have you start fairly close to your objectives. The longer missions require you to start on the ground, take off and land again, taking approximately an hour to complete. We were also told that missions created by the community would be integrated into the game at a later date.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad is scheduled for release in September 2014 and we can say, we’re pretty excited for this one!

ILYA Muromets

This is another flight simulator but this time, you fly the world’s first heavy bomber, the ILYA Muromets. Predominantly used in World War I and the Russian Revolution, the plane made its legendary flight from St. Petersburg to Kiev on 17th June, 1914. We are interested in where 1C will be taking the background story for this particular title. Recent news has revealed that it will be taking place during the Brusilov Breakthrough that ran from May 1916 to November 1916.

ILYA Muromets is based off Rise of Flight, another World War I flight simulator. As with the newest iteration of IL-2 Sturmovik, 1C wanted ILYA to also be educational as well as enjoyable. They believe that mixing history into a game creates an entirely new sub-genre of ‘documentary game”.

During our time with the game, we found a lot of similarities to IL-2 Sturmovik but the key difference was the inability to do anything too crazy. Whilst IL-2 was fairly forgiving to a degree (well, on the easier settings anyway), ILYA Muromets will overheat your engine in a heartbeat, spinning you out of control at the first sign of a sharp maneuver. Sticking with the theme of authenticity, we had oil splashed in our face (in the game fortunately) during our flights whilst attempting a maneuver, making it difficult to see momentarily.

The controls for ILYA Muromets seem a lot more advanced and confusing for us ordinary folk, but it seems that it is aimed at a much more advanced audience, unlike IL-2.

ILYA Muromets is scheduled for release October 2014.