I've been playing flight simulators since I was five or six. Microsoft Flight Sim 3.0 and 2004 were staples of my childhood, and I tried out as many sims I could get my hands on at the library. That's where, in the mid 2000's, I came across IL-2 Sturmovik, and it blew my mind. The principles I had learned about flight were suddenly tested to the extreme; it wasn't just about being able to turn smoothly, you had to push the plane to its limits as you dodged enemy fire and attempted to center your sights on a jinking Bf-109. For $10, you get an expansive playground that lets you fly individual missions, linear campaigns, dynamic campaigns that react to your successes and failures, and quick one-offs you customize yourself. Pretty much every major plane from WWII is either flyable or available to be flown by the AI. The damage modeling is incredible, and the flight model excellent, with every plane's quirks firmly present. There is also a wide variety of maps and nations to choose from, letting you fly in pretty much every theater big and small. Furthermore, if the already incredible amount of content doesn't satisfy you, there's an excellent mod called B.A.T. which adds a plethora of new maps, planes, and campaigns/missions, as well as fixing a bunch of niggling issues still present in the original game. The graphics are older, but still passable in my opinion, and personally I'd much rather have butter-smooth frame-rates than gorgeous villages given the necessity of split second reactions. No modern graphics card should have any trouble running this at max settings, regardless of how big your battles become. The one downside I suppose is that it's a proper flight simulator; if you're expecting something arcade-like, this isn't it, though there are plenty of settings that can tone down the realism. Overall, this is still a fantastic game in 2022 and worth getting, even with the new IL2 games around.
