[Feuer Frei!]

I fired this game up last night, and to me THIS post over at the Ubi Forums sums it up really really well:

Really... I felt like I was testing a game in it's alpha version. There is no good feel at all with the aircraft, the game frames per second drops and raises between 5-40 all the time and lowering the graphics didn't help any. The constant changing of framespersecond actually makes it feel more akward than a steady fps of 20 for example.

After lowering the graphcis to medium/low, the game looked bad. Very bad from what had been promised in trailers, it looked much worse than Il2 : Forgotten Battles for example. Other aspects besides graphics bothered me as well...

The Sounds. Oh my. Were the sounds in this game recorded with a cell phone on a busy street?! THE SOUNDS WERE AWFUL, much much worse than in Il2:FB (it had decent sounds actually) that I already mentioned. How can you go wrong so much...?

Startup of a single mission. I tried 2 single missions and one quick mission. It was... bad.
At the very start all I can see is me in my plane already in the sky (I specified in options that I want missions to include both take-off and landing). All I can hear at the start is terrible mess of screams, talking over eacdhother in a terrible barrage of commands, anknowledgements and other shouts wich made me feel as I was in the fiery pit of Hell. Actually, nothing was really happening, the AI is just allowed to speak over eachother (while filling the upper part of the screen with red text), and you, the player are supposed to get some sense of it all. Training missions were full of donkeypoo also. I am not new to the Il-2 series, nor flight sims, but if I was the training wouldn't help me at all. In takeoff training the player is supposed to manage to listen to poor quality sound of some flight instructor giving a monologue of a few minutes of continuos stream of information spontaneously, and you are supposed to get it all. Previous sentence was an example of how clear the instructor could be at times.
Then he gives you the command of the plane, and you are supposed to take-off in 20 seconds or so, or else he starts yelling at you in an akward way. There is no indication of what the controls are, nothing told about anything to be precise.

This leads to another problem I found. The whole control setting scheme. The game didn't even run at first with my joystick, which has always run any previous Il-2 from the get-to-go.
After a lot of binding and twicthing with axel settings and other commands in the ugly and inconvenient menu, I tried the controls out. About 1/3 of them actually worked! Wonderful.
I was left wondering why I can't bind elevator trim on my joystick buttons. Bleggh the whole progress of setting quick keys was almost as frustrating than trying to get those good for nothing magical boxes out of my view. Turns out I had to alt+click them (Nobody ever tells you anything in this game) and rightclick and choose close them.

There were other minor problems I encountered in the game, but in summary: Fix graphic issues/optimizations, redo sounds or improve quality, make the menu more user friendly(controls menu in particular), and really improve the way tutorials and AI work when it comes to communication.
I really do hope you work hard to patch the game... I didn't pay 50€ to be a beta/alpha tester.

I'll be dogfighting in Il2: Forgotten battles till you do . Ok take care now.

Spot on analysis
Not spot on for game