The core game loop is very well executed. Going into combat with your lance of mechs is a lot of fun mainly due to the excellent mechanics and UI. The prospect of winning all that salvage to customize your 'mechs or even add new 'mechs to your roster makes it addictive. Travelling around the starmap as you please and allowing you to choose your missions as you please (in career mode) gives you enough agency to make it feel like a true open world game. You decide. There's hardly any story in career mode but that would only reduce that freedom (and the 100hr campaign is there to cater to those players). All this is severely hampered by the developer's bad exception handling decisions. You might have noticed people here complaining about inexplicably long loading and action times. I experience those too. The cause of these problems? For some reason - Maybe due to Unity? Maybe due to release pressure? Maybe due to laziness? maybe due to incompetence (but I doubt that's the case)? - the developer decided to launch a parallel process named "UnityCrashHandler64" with the main game proces every time you start the game. Whenever the game throws an unhandled exception (but why would you allow exceptions to go unhandled in the first place?!) it becomes non-responsive (the task Manager clearly shows 'not responding'), then that silly parallel proces has to handle the exception and then manage the game proces to get it running again... These are extremely expensive operations for a computer. Even a very strong computer will lose seconds whenever this happens, and it happens A LOT... The coders clearly started leaning into this error handling proces and the code is full of unhandled exceptions that make the game non-responsive until the parallel proces gets it moving again... This is very aggravating and chases many people away from the game. It drops the rating, causes scathing reviews, etc... For what is essentially a very fun game. It's a crying shame.
IL-2 1946 in and of itself offers dozens of flyable aircraft, maps, campaigns and missions (many times more than the closest competition). It's also very stable, offers some of the best modelling you can find and still is the best flightsim to play with or against other people (thanks to years of tweaking the network code). If that is not enough, the enthousiastic and still very active community offers you: - Dark Blue World 1916 v3: converts this to a great WWI simulator (you can have several copies of the game on your hard disk side by side, so don't worry about having to choose). - Spanish Civil War v1.6: adds a great Spanish Civil War simulator (as a mod, not a conversion). - a highly flexible/customizable Dynamic Campaign Generator that creates missions based on what happened previously. - and there are still dozens more planes/maps/skins to download (you could conceivably make your own Korean war mod/conversion). The graphics are getting a bit old if you compare it to its kid brother "Battle of Stalingrad" (having decent shadows in the cockpit is very handy for orientation) and the weather/damage modelling could be more realistic/detailed with todays processor power, but there still isn't anything out there that can beat the complete package.
