In the last major update for IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles, we finally saw the release of the long in development Finnish Gulf map. This is a fascinating area, a very interesting mapping project, and its ended up tapping into a lot of nostalgia for this long time flight simmer. Let’s have a look at this new map!

Feeling the nostalgia

One map I really got a lot of enjoyment out of back in the old IL-2 Sturmovik: Forgotten Battles days was the old Finnish Gulf map. One of the series largest and most complex maps at the time (circa 2003), Finnish Gulf was not well suited to the series multiplayer servers of the time but it was a great single player map and I both played and developed missions and campaigns for the area (some of them are even part of the Team Daidalos update packs). Returning to this area in Great Battles was something I was very excited about and now that moment has arrived.

That is also why I was so enthused when I heard from Kartta Komppania, the primarily Finnish-based map developers, who had been working on this map project for almost a decade. I did an exclusive interview with them back in 2023. Now, their efforts have finally paid off in a big way. 1CGS also became involved with the map effort and combined efforts helped bring the full scale of the map together.

What do we get?

The map is 204 x 277 kilometers, or 56,000 square kilometers in size making it one of the smaller maps in the series. That also makes it a fair bit smaller than the original and smaller than some of the maps in IL-2 Great Battles. The map extends about 50 kilometers to the east of Leningrad (modern day St. Petersburg) and to the west it goes as far as Kotka in Finland and then extending nearly 100 kilometers to the north. Though it may be smaller than the original, the map is well setup to represent a good amount of the tactical aviation employed throughout the 1941 to 1944 time period where air (and ground) combat was highly active in this area. Even with the larger map, I ended up flying mostly in the zone that this new map represents so its a good compromise on what there was time to build and use.

I’m once again reminded that the series is very much in its twilight even if its development has extended quite a bit further out than I would have expected. I think they’ve done the best job possible with mixed resources and with the efforts of both the Finnish and internal 1CGS teams.

One thing that I remember from the old map was flying over Leningrad which was both really cool at the time as well as horrendous to my framerates. The original IL-2 series was just not good with dense urban centres. The new one? Handles it easily as we’ve seen with lots of urban zones in the past and this city is no exception.

There’s still some of the pop-in if you zoom in on the city quickly where some buildings will take time to populate, but generally speaking it works fairly well and the city layout feels faithful enough for a combat sim of IL-2 Great Battles generation. To be clear, this is not a MSFS 2024 level of city development but it is consistent for the other cities that we have in the current generation.

Of course, Leningrad isn’t the only place and we have plenty of smaller cities, towns and villages and here the efforts of both map teams have really come together to offer unique assets in both the Finnish areas and in the Soviet Union areas. Some of the bigger ones include Kotka and Viipuri (modern day Vyborg) and these too have their own custom landmarks and zones.

Outside of those areas, you get more generic kind of setups though this is very typical for the IL-2 series. Even so, this map is like the Odessa map where the layout of these villages and towns feel very natural and well suited to the terrain around them.

There are some unique features like a lot of logging areas that have their own assets. There are some unique industries and other kinds of details around too.

Airports are particularly impressive. There are some great airstrips, carved out of forest, that you’ll find on the Finnish side. It looks stunning and suitably rustic to fit the scenario. Some of the layouts are also quite unique which is great. Over on the Soviet side you’ll see some more typical layouts to the series which, again, fits the aesthetic of the map well. Kotlin island and Kronstadt naval base is an interesting area as well!

The career mode, seasons and other items

Leningrad, unlike Odessa before it, launches with Career mode already in place. There is the caveat that its just the first chapter right now and additional chapters will be coming later on. For now we’ve got a summer 1941-42 scenario in place for now.

The career, in my experience so far, is actually really good and especially so for the Soviet side where most of the airfields are clustered near Leningrad. The travel times and time to action is really quite short here which makes for some exciting flying.

What we don’t yet have is Finish involvement in the career. It’s very Germany vs Soviet Union centric. Now, I suspect that may change with a teased future content pack possibly aimed (though not confirmed) at bringing over several Finnish aircraft and then packing an updated career experience in from there.

It’s also worth noting that people who own Odessa and Leningrad only will have very limited aircraft choices in this campaign as it stands now. Bf109E-4, I-153, Yak-1 Series 23, and LaGG-3 Series 4 are going to be your primary aircraft. It leans heavily on content from Battle of Moscow in these stages so if you want more things to fly, you’ll want to grab that one too. Later stages will no doubt pick up types from other eastern front releases.

For now we’re also missing advanced quick mission builder missions (AQMB). I really value those as a way to experience a quick scenario doing something that I haven’t set up a career for. I’m hoping we’ll see those come along shortly.

Right now we have both the summer and winter seasons. We don’t yet have an autumn or spring. Infact, 1CGS are plotting to include five seasonal variations with a transitional late autumn or early spring variation as well. Those will come in time and enhance the map.

Final thoughts

IL-2 Siege and Liberation is a kind of unusual add-on and really only one that could come at the end of the series development. One of the ways that it is unusual is with the addition of not one but two maps. Odessa was pretty good but this Finnish Gulf map is superb!

It’s not only the nostalgia factor but also the details on offer. Kartta Kompania’s efforts to research the area including the airbases, the local towns, how they looked in the 1940s, it’s all paid off with natural looking locations and a great selection of points of interest that help give the map such a unique flare.

Then there’s Leningrad itself which has a ton of points of interest from statues to churches and other facilities. It’s central to the map’s space and an area that you’ll fly near or over on a regular basis and that makes it really important. Fortunately, its well executed.

Though smaller than the original, this one manages to be really solid in most other respects. I appreciate that we’re coming close to the end of Great Battles tenure as its successor is waiting in the wings. That means that there are priorities to manage and it looks like they did a smart job with this one making use of the most important areas.

I hope to be flying sorties over this map for a long time to come!

Screenshots