When you’ve flown and done many of the same kinds of missions over and over again it’s sometimes good to break from the mould. Yesterday I flew a few missions in Sampson’s new Taman Peninsula campaign and came across this brilliant mission where you had to intercept IL-2’s – at night

Looking for aircraft in the inky black

Turn off your office lights and just appreciate night flying in IL-2 which is at once very difficult and also incredibly beautiful. Constellations are easily visible, stars twinkle (seriously, they do) and the moon puts on a beautiful show.

Once over the port at Novorossiysk everything appeared quiet but that didn’t last long. On the ground, machine guns fired back and forth as troops fought house to house and soon the search lights would find me my first target. An IL-2.

You don’t get very long so you have to pounce quickly and all without the benefit of a real sense of space that way that you do during the day. You have far fewer clues on your approach speed and how far you are from your target.

If all goes well, you can get guns on target and emerge victorious. Or, as I did the first few times, I miss judged my approach completely and either missed, overshot or got only a glancing shot.

Unseen but still well detailed

It’s a cool mission and one that I was reluctant to fly but ultimately it was rewarding. All the moreso with just how cool some of the graphics work is in IL-2 right down to the harsh shadows from search lights.

For a feature that I don’t see very often (and really, how many of you see them), it’s an incredibly detailed effect.

Back to playing more of the campaign!