Recent reviews by mandarg

This game is pure unadulterated fun. The graphics are impeccable even now. No blur. No gimmicks or seasons. Just an outrageously solid team based fps. You dont even need to be on comms to play well as as team

does anything even need to be said? THey could have kept warzone the same as launch and it could have rivalled counterstrike. Now bankruptcy awaits

Has potential, but needs a LOT of time and work before I'll bother playing it again.

> The pop-in, A-life and AI downgrades, poor optimisation, spawning, balance, day/night cycle are all bad.
> The core game story, diverging plot lines, etc is light years better than the old games and is worthy of praise.
> The environment is very good, but exploring it is a pain.

If you want that experience of crouching behind cover in the rain, listening to distant gunfire, staring through binoculars to see what's going on in the distance, planning your next moves... there is none of that here, unfortunately. Neither will you sneak past bandits, meet a friendly NPC squad heading their way, and hear the resulting gunfight in the distance as you move elsewhere. There's not even much in the way of campfire stories now. It's a cool story shooter and it looks like Stalker but it's missing the DNA

23 hours in, I haven't played a minute of the main quest, the robot sidekick is back in new atlantis, and I'm already knee deep in fun stuff, drug smuggling, LARPing as the reincarnation of a dead space superhero (complete with silly outfit) who's ship I stole from a space bat-cave, etc. Random little side quests turn into hours of playtime. My expectations were low but its a great bethesda game, so many things to do, cool locations, the cities are actually pretty fleshed out, the planets are boiled down into smaller areas where you can actually find stuff/quests. If you're the kind of person who mods skyrim to just do your own thing and ignore the main plot, this game gives you complete freedom. Having a blast so far

The "mixed" review status is nonsense.

There are two active sims on the market that have a large following - there's this, and there's DCS.

DCS is a proper study sim, and a such, you pay as much per aircraft as you do for a regular game. DCS is about as detailed as it gets.

IL2 is somewhere between a survey sim and a study sim. You get a bunch of planes in the base game and there's a load more you can buy.

People are losing it over the prices of the planes and the numbers of planes you get with the game compared to old versions of IL2. But this isn't fair, and doesn't reflect the sheer level of detail in the flight model and systems that are in this game.

Overall, it's true that if you buy all 3 games in the series, and all the collector planes, and all the other stuff (tank addons etc), you'll be paying hundreds of dollars/pounds for the experience. However, THIS IS THE NATURE OF THE SM MARKET NOW. It's not like there is a competing title that bundles all the planes together for a single low price that models things to a comparable level.

In this game, you don't get manual for the aircraft, you just download a PDF of the -actual- manual for the -real- aircraft and use that as your reference. That's a sign of how decent the simulation level is. Plus it's FUN. There's enough people playing online to keep playing forever.

The developers are constantly fixing and improving the software, are in regular comms with the player base, and take a lot of the comments and feedback on board.

It's not a casual game or arcade game.

The reason for the poor reviews is essentially just butthurt that fails to take into account the points raised above. If you have money and time to get a nice joystick, throttle, and get proper head tracking or VR, and want a good balance between depth and fun, then buy this game. You'll acquire a full on flight simulator in your house for a few hundred bucks (all the content, the hardware, etc).

If you're looking for something quick and fun to play that's cheap and that doesn't need a load of gear to enjoy, play something else, as this is too involved.