Recent reviews by Revolves

Nice, tight combat. Difficult in a good way - you get better with each and every try until you beat a level. Also a good game to play if you've only got 30 mins - load in quickly, and just fight - a single round will be over in at most 10 mins.

Harder yet fairer than dark souls. For example, dying to a boss 100-400 times on normal ("mortal") difficultly before defeating that boss was my usual experience. Yet those boss fights are fair - there is little RNG (main RNG is which attack gets chosen), and every attack is clearly telegraphed.

Same thing with the platforming - there are no hidden ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ traps, it's just that challenging. And challenging in a good way - none of the platforming involves pixel-perfect spacing or frame-perfect timing. There are no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ traps around the corner which you can't see coming and have to memorize.

The game is daunting, frustrating, and playing it is just short of masochistic, but every attempt gets you that little bit further, and ultimately that's what drove me to play so much of the game.

IL-2 has a lot of things going for it, like a nice "feel of flight", differing flight characteristics among many planes, an active multiplayer community, a much better bang-for-buck than DCS, and a pretty high skill cap. It's a difficult game to get into, with no tutorial you'll have to rely on online resources or some more experienced person to show you the ropes, but that's to be expected for a flight sim. The devs, while being somewhat slow, are still actively developing the game.

However, I feel like the current state of IL-2 is not worth it for several reasons.

- If you're going into SP only, I'm afraid the AI is rather basic, for example the AI can not do dive recovery, so you can often bait pursuers into lawndarting by intiating a steep dive and pulling out just a in time. AI is also sometimes incapable of landing, preferring instead to crash their planes next to the airfield.

- There are flaws in the flight mode and g-model which are abused to the brim in multiplayer.
-- It is currently possible to rapidly flick your elevator and rudder up and down, which results in your plane wobbling all over the place and it's a crap-shoot to try and gun someone down who's doing that. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a5tEUka4w-M . What's more, this is often your only viable defensive maneuvers because the G-model heavily punishes long lasting pulls in a single direction - even pulling a constant 4Gwill black you out after 30 seconds. EDIT: The devs have fixed this issue - you now have more options defensively as long as you keep your Gs in check. Wobbling is still very effective.
-- You can hang on your propeller pointing your plane upwards at full power and you'll be perfectly stable for a long, long time. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFc9hcwbZ50
-- A lot of planes retain and regain energy really quickly, far quicker than in DCS and most other WWII flight sims. In particular the tempest can just keep turning and keep its energy state up.

- The current damage model leaves much to be desired. Currently, AP ammunition does very little unless you score an engine, pilot kill, or the rare fire. You can hit over 100 AP rounds into a plane, and if you miss engine, pilot, and fire, then you might as well have done nothing. In contrast getting hit by a single high explosive bullet will absolutely wreck your plane. A single 13mm HE to a non-critical area can strip 150 KM/H of speed off your plane, and force you to permanently correct your roll in one direction. Consequently planes which use more HE ammo are much better, meaning British and German planes have far superior firepower when compared to Soviet or American types. This is particularly egregious with the P-47 and P-51, planes which require currently require amazing precision or luck to kill with, as you must either hit the pilot or engine. What's particularly frustrating is that the last iteration of the damage model, while not perfect, was fine. The current iteration has been out for about a year.

An okay game - especially if you like the paintball game in rec room. This essentially is paintball from rec room with a few more bells and whistles (power ups, better teleport mechanic, ability to block/catch incoming balls) and some polish on top. I bought this game after seeing the highly positive reviews here on steam and praise for it on the vive subreddit.

I played about ten multiplayer games and I realized the game wasn't a hit for me. There were several problems which stood out to me:

1. As someone playing from Europe, I had to play on the US East region since that's the default region and no one switched to the European one. Perhaps some way to automatically set the best default region would be better? As a result I had some pretty noticeable lag with a ping varying from 110 to 160. The game felt floaty at times. This is especially noticeable when dying - I would get hit, and after a blink of eye I was dead, still giving me some time to react before the game actually said I was dead.

2. Maybe this is also a problem only when playing from Europe - I played the game on a Thursday since my schedule only lets me game on weekdays - but of the ten games I played, only two didn't have two or more bots. Now I'm not against the bots in this game (they're okay - like rocket league bots they sort of just stand around and sometimes randomly do something good), and it's a good idea to fill up to a 3 v 3 - but it still kind of sucks to play with/against bots. On top of that, somehow the bots were poorly distributed in one of the matches I played. It was a 3 players vs 1 player and 2 bots match - that was a really unfair + not fun match.

3. I personally dislike the teleport mechanism in shooting or shooting-like games in general. Smashbox Arena does improve on the mechanic by letting people see where another person is going to teleport to before it actually happens. This does not, however, prevent people from sneaking up behind you far quicker than it would normally be possible, which makes cover far less valuable. This certainly makes the game more action heavy and fast-paced, but for my tastes it was too chaotic.

However, if you like the paint ball game in rec room and you're playing from North America - then this game should be right up your alley. If you're like me and were disappointed from the paintball in rec room, then this game won't be the best thing since Budget Cuts/The Lab/Onward, especially not for the price tag of 23/27 Euros.