Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1782 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: UBI Soft
• Released on: 2006-12-15
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Platform: Windows XP

Manufacturer's Description:
Oleg Maddox’s world famous Il-2 Sturmovik series of flight simulators continues to expand. The latest offering, Il-2 1946, adds 36 new planes, four new gigantic maps, over a hundred new ground objects, and nearly 200 new campaign missions. This new opus also includes all of the previous Il-2 series content. What began as a one-aircraft study sim is now an astonishing anthology, with a whopping 229 flyable aircraft and over 300 aircraft total! Not to mention that players will have the opportunity to get a first glance at the future of the series arriving next year: Storm of War Battle of Britain via exclusive bonus videos.

The game offers 32 new flyable fighters and bombers, and four new AI aircraft. Over the Russian Front, the player will gain access to six new versions of the Petlyakov Pe-2, the most famous Soviet level and dive bomber of the war. In the Far East and the Pacific, players will finally fly the long-awaited one true heir to the series namesake, the Il-10 Sturmovik. Other new planes range from the Ki-27 Nate, the plane that fought against the Flying Tigers in 1941, to the N1K2 George and J2M5 Jack, the two most advanced Japanese fighters of WWII. The player will fly over a dozen new jet and rocket aircraft such as the MiG-9 jet fighter, the predecessor to the famous MiG-15 that gained world-wide fame in the Korean War; the Ta-183, a jet fighter designed by Kurt Tank, the creator of the famous FW-190, and the Arado Ar-234 Blitz, the world’s first operation jet bomber.

Large new historical maps of the Kiev region; a map of Manchuria focusing on a border region between USSR, China and Japanese-occupied Korea; a large bonus Burma map; and an online Khalkin Gol / Nomonhan map.

The game features nine new campaigns with nearly 200 missions, all with incredible realism and attention to detail. There are detailed careers for fighter and bomber pilots, for the German, Soviet, and Japanese air forces, offering such varied objectives as flying jet bombers over occupied Europe, to intercepting American B-29 Super fortresses over Iwo Jima and Japanese home islands! As opposed to dynamically generated campaigns that shipped with our previous offerings, the new missions are all hand-made, giving the player much more detailed environments, and much more exciting missions.

Three of the nine campaigns are a departure into alternate history, focusing on hypothetical battles between the Soviet Union and Germany in the year 1946 where WWII still rages on. Both the VVS and Luftwaffe now have access to advanced jet and rocket fighters, and other revolutionary technology. All of these new planes are modeled with the same incredible degree of historical accuracy and attention to detail as all the other planes in Il-2.

With the alternate history campaigns, the player will gain access to such exotic equipment as Soviet mixed-power fighters, using both piston and rocket engines; will fly incredible jet aircraft capable of sub-sonic speeds; and launch wire-guided air-to-air rockets at enemy bomber formations. 1946 also adds an incredible variety of new ground targets, including, for the first time in the series, trenches and bunkers that give a whole new dimension to the ground attack aspect of the sim.

The new planes, as well as many of the other ones in the series, come with a host of historical paint schemes, showing many of the individual aircraft or squadrons that served in WWII.

Also included is a detailed document, totaling over 450 pages of information, giving the low-down on every single one of our 229 flyable aircraft, and allowing new players much easier access to the incredible variety of aircraft in the sim.

Rounding off the package is a slew of exclusive bonus content including a making of, interview videos and screenshots of the new features, plus exclusive screenshots and never seen before videos taken from the next Maddox game: Storm of War: Battle of Britain. Those videos highlight some of the great improvements players will enjoy at end of next year. You’ll also find IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles, Ace Expansion Pack and Pacific Fighters.

Customer Reviews

Tally ho chums - Fantastic
I'm a big fan of the IL2 line of games, and this release adds on to what is already a fast growing collection of superbly detailed aircraft. There are literally hundreds of battle flying hours here, the missions have been well thought out and the AI challenging.

This isn't a game for the faint of heart, you have very little time to think about flying when in battle, all ww2 planes were heavy on mechnical controls, all of these controls are working in this game. So part of the fun is finding how these controls work and when to use them (for example) proppellor pitch contols to slow when in a split-S.

This game also includes previous addons including Pacific Fighters / Aces and others. All of these are in the same game environment, so there is no need to switch between games when playing.

The greatest achivement for Oleg and his team is his ability to create an overall emersive feeling of flight. I have often found myself on tender hooks in the foray of battle. Hairs stand on end when I see tracer bullets fly from my six where my wingman should be.

Some of the game scenarios are classic, but the realism is outstanding. Try diving a Hurricane at a fast moving train from one thousand feet and hear the engines scream - oh joy.

Ok, enough talking back to work - smoke me a kipper I'll be back for breakfast.

IL2 is Magic
This is a must buy for anyone who even vaguely likes WWII flight sims or any combat sim. The sheer breadth of this package is amazing. It covers several theatres of the war over the whole timeline and even in to a hypothetical extension of WWII into 1946.

I have yet to explore even a small fraction of what is on offer, but first impressions are very good. The simulator is based around a tried and tested graphics engine that has you in a virtual cockpit that re-creates in detail the whole of the flight deck (360 degrees) for each of the many planes in the game. Thought the graphics may not be best in class, they are very good and can run smoothly on relatively low grade PCs. Some have commented that the sound is crude, but it is contextual at least.

Picture this:- you are flying a Junkers divebomber over the Russian front and have been ordered to dive bomb the Mariat a large warship currently docked in port. After evading the Russian air defenses you and your flight of Stukkas make a bee line for the great grey boat lying at anchor. There she is !! you can clearly make her out amongst the smoke and hail of flak coming up to greet you. You call your flight into attack and then flip your plane onto its back, chop the throttle back to idle and extend the dive brakes you pull back on the stick and go into a vertical dive directly over the target. You quicly pick up speed and can hear the screech of the Stukka, at 300 meters you drop your single bomb and pull up sharply to make a slow and vunerable dash at full throttle over the sea as the Mariat goes up up behind you in a massive explosion.


You can fly aircraft from every side on almost every front.

Being a Russian software house the emphasis is on the Soviet Union vs Germany in Europe, but there is also a large section devoted to the US vs Japan and many other theatres and fronts.

The overall feeling is that this is software written by enthusiasts for enthusiats. Some of the documentation is less polished than say a Microsoft product, but it has the soul of the Authours love for their subject that no McMicrosoft product ever did.

This box comes with a DVD that will wet your appetite for the game, but really it is the main game and it's add-ons that thrill.

I have not had a chance to play for extended periods yet, so have only made use of the single flight options, but you can also plan your own flights and undertake a series of 'career' flights which are generated based on your progress. This should mean many days of happy flying.

At this price what have you got to loose, it's Greeaaattt.

Great game but the copy protection!
The game itself merits 5 stars. The copy protection merits 0 stars. Overall-2 1/2 stars. I bought a legal copy from a famous legit software store here. It installed fine but I couldn't get it to run. After doing a laborious and fruitless search on the Net I experimented a little on my own and finally-success. I got it to run. But my experience makes me feel very wary about buying new software until I read about problems people have playing and/or installing. I used to buy software after reading reviews. Not now. Copy protection kills a company's customer base! And not only for the guilty company with bad copy protection. It's bad for other companies as well. Many people just give up and don't go back to the stores. I may become one of these. For example, when you first run the game the protection software 'informs you that your system clock apppears to be wrong.' And then after a long period while it connects to the Internet it begins to run. However, if you don't have an Internet connection the software won't run. There is no information about this in the documentation!

Update: I just bought the North American edition of this program. It runs beautifully with no Internet connection! I assume that different copy protection is used.