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The most authentic, challenging, and beautiful pre-jet age combat flight sim ever made.

Movie critics have pointed out for decades that making a better sequel to a great film is mostly an exercise in futility. There have been some notable exceptions, including Godfather II and Aliens. In my opinion the reverse is true in PC entertainment software.

Sequels are usually better than the original. IL2 Sturmovik, released in late 2001 by Russian developer, Oleg Maddox, was the best WWII flight sim ever made. Not willing to rest on his laurels, Maddox has produced what military flight jockeys have been waiting for: IL2 Part Deux. The actual name is Forgotten Battles, and it is now the new king in the combat flight sim world.


What’s So Great About It?

Forgotten Battles is a combat flight sim that does everything well, including one or two things that make it superior to the original. Both games are true simulations and have maximum appeal primarily for gamers who prefer hardcore (i.e. realistic) simulations.

Simply put, Forgotten Battles is to WWII flight sims what Papyrus’ long-standing NASCAR series is to racing sims. Hardcore to the max, but with enough realism tweaks to make it accessible to the casual crowd. And like that great racing series, 1C-Maddox Games’ flight sims are approaching legendary status. They’re that good.

Forgotten Battles, like its predecessor, focuses on the war on the Eastern Front, which was mostly between Russia and Germany. You won’t find battles over Britain in this game, and the Pacific Theater is nowhere in sight.


Gameplay

Casual gamers can play Forgotten Battles' series of 20 single-player missions or jump right into creating your own conflict. You’ll pick your own aircraft, which dictates the country you’re flying for, and the number and type of enemies, including ground defenses. You can go it alone or surround yourself with wingmen. And you get to pick the planes everyone will fly.

The single missions are spread out to include the interests of five countries. There are nine USSR missions, including three in an American P47, four missions involving Germany, four for Finland, two for Hungary and one USA mission.

Hardcore gamers may be more interested in Forgotten Battles' scorching multiplayer action. Any night more than a hundred like-minded air warriors can be found on ubi.com (UbiSoft’s servers), and they’re itching for combat. The first time I logged on to ubi.com I jumped into a room with seven other flight jockeys. The host had the room set up with all settings on maximum realism.

Although I prefer hardcore flight sims to those with casual physics, it had been awhile since I had played the original IL2 or any other hardcore flight sim. I found myself sitting on the runway in an unfamiliar Russian plane trying to remember how to take off.

Meanwhile, there were seven other people somewhere up there in the clouds engaged in thrilling combat action unaware of my embarrassing moment. Fortunately, I was able to hold off panic and figure out how to start the engines and achieve take-off speed before running out of runway and game time.

Once in the air, I found myself in heaven more ways than I can count. Forgotten Battles has excellent combat A.I., but there’s nothing as unpredictable as going against real humans. For me, nothing is more gratifying than getting locked up in mortal combat with air jockeys who really know how to fly. Too bad I wasn’t one of them. Over and over again, I was drilled, plummeting to earth with my aircraft in shreds, aflame or both.

Part of my problem was a temporary memory lapse on how to recover from stalls and spins. Once I did, I gave as well as I got.

Another way to play Forgotten Battles is to play the campaign, which is set up to produce a dynamic series of missions. Actually, you can choose between a static branching campaign and a dynamic campaign. Choose the latter. In the dynamic mode missions will never repeat because events are determined randomly and are affected by your success or lack thereof.

You can play as a career pilot. But don’t forget that for many pilots in this era careers were often brutally short. Pilots can be promoted, redeployed or given awards. They can also be captured. When you lose squadron mates, it is more likely they’ll be replaced by newbies rather than veterans.

As a career pilot you can fly for Russia, Germany, Finland or Hungary. For Russia and Germany you can enjoy a career as either a fighter pilot or bomber pilot. For Hungary and Finland, the only option is to be a fighter pilot. Regardless of the country you choose to represent, the campaign mode in Forgotten Battles is huge.

This is not a “done in two hours” first person shooter. You can average about 30 missions in a campaign. A career could include up to eight campaigns. Do the math. You will not complain that Forgotten Battles is too short or has too few missions.

Finally, I have to admit to shock at my failure to experience much in the way of lag or game crashing bugs in multiplayer, but maybe I’m just luckier than most. However, I would suggest that you not try Internet multiplayer without a broadband connection.


Graphics

Forgotten Battles wins bragging rights for the best visuals in the flight sim universe. The previous graphics king, Jane’s WWII Fighters, is close but falls short, especially the terrain textures. Forgotten Battles reigns supreme in every aspect, including plane models, terrain textures, clouds, and water. Rivers and lakes glimmer at sunset and shimmer under bright noonday sunlight.

Low-level flying offers a convincing sense of high speed as you zoom through towns and skim treetops. As a combat flight sim, the real treat is witnessing the damage caused to enemy aircraft by your 20mm cannons. Aircraft come apart almost bolt by bolt. A wing can be shot off almost whole as if severed by a saw or shattered into pieces the size of matchsticks.

Explosions can occur instantly if you hit an engine or fuel tank or even a bomb that hadn’t been released. Watch landing gear fly, pieces of wing, the cockpit canopy, almost anything appears to be possible, maximizing an already outstanding level of immersion.

My recommendation is to run Forgotten Battles in OpenGL. The graphics look better (than in D3D), and at 1600 x 1200 resolution (yes, it is possible) the visuals are stunning. I suspect the game is optimized for OpenGL. I have no proof of this other than that when the game loaded it defaulted to that mode. Nevertheless, for this game and this game only, OpenGL is my renderer of choice.


Sound

While some reviewers may claim the engines of the many different Russian and German aircraft sound “incredibly authentic” I won’t. I’m not that old. I have no idea how a Stuka or IL2 engine from WWII is supposed to sound. I can say that the engines sound like I would imagine they should.

Every plane has a unique and robust engine sound that thrilled me even when they were blown to bits by enemy bullets, coughing and sputtering, throwing me into a death spiral at 10,000 feet.

Ambient sounds like wind and rain are frighteningly realistic. Just pull back your canopy in a fighter or take the exposed rear gunner position in an IL2 and you’ll be dumbstruck by the amazing sounds. The buffeting you experience sounds (and feels) real. And effects such as machine guns firing sound differently inside the cockpit than outside, as they should.


Bonus

One of the nice touches in Forgotten Battles is the ability to take a bomber into battle and either be the pilot or man any of the gunnery positions. This is a feature that hasn’t been done well since B-17 Flying Fortress II. Microsoft’s Combat Flight Sim 3 offers it, but it is so poorly implemented it isn’t worth playing.

Once again, 1C- Maddox Games shows the competition how it’s supposed to be done. And let’s be honest. Nobody really wants to actually pilot a bomber. The hot action is manning the door and bubble machine guns and trying to hit those pesky enemy fighters, which can be harder to do than hitting bees with spit balls, but it sure is fun. And when you get a kill that way it’s totally cool.


Conclusion

Forgotten Battles is a beast. Out of the box it’s the biggest and baddest military flight sim available, and will please single-player and multi-player gamers equally. While it’s accessible to casual combat sim flyers, it is clear that it was developed primarily to please the hardcore crowd.

There is a training component but it mostly talks at you. For example, the “air combat” training, among other things, talks you through a visual representation of deflection firing (leading your target) and how it is different depending on the angle of attack (head-on vs. from the rear vs. perpendicular vs. from above vs. from below, etc). But you don’t get the chance to actually practice doing what the program shows you while in air combat training. Good luck, pal.

The manual is sparse, providing only two pages on air combat tactics. There is no information in the manual about any aircraft features or nuances. Fortunately, you can find information about every aircraft and vehicle inside the game itself.

There are technical specs and plenty of history, but only a brief sentence or two about the flying characteristics (personalities) of the planes. In addition to the text you can view a colorful screen shot of each aircraft and scrutinize it 360 degrees.

Forgotten Battles comes mighty close to masterpiece status. A tweak here and a tweak there, perhaps a storyline about pilots and crew members, more of a human touch, and more information about situational use of each aircraft, detailed pros and cons, and it may very well achieve that rare feat.


Review by Walter Hurdle.