We’ve all heard the complaints over the years. Fly a ground attack mission in a sim, drop something next to a vehicle or a tank, and because you missed by a few meters nothing happened to that vehicle. Various attempts have been made to make splash damage effects better but nothing has really impressed me. Until now. Let’s have a look at the IL-2 Series ground attack experience!

You wanted splash damage? We’ve got splash damage!

I’m pleased to see that in many ways, despite quite a few changes under the hood, IL-2 Series Korea is still holding onto its roots. At the core of the IL-2 series is, of course, the IL-2 Sturmovik. An armored ground attack aircraft of prolific construction, its direct successor, the IL-10 is present in IL-2 Series Korea and fills the role of the IL-2 with just a little more power and speed. And the sim lets this type of aircraft play in a way that is both familiar and new.

The biggest difference is that there is just a lot more detail to all of the ground targets. The artillery? It’s a complete crew now including all of the different roles in the crew and they can be killed or they can run away making the artillery ineffective. It’s the same for trucks and other vehicles.

If previous combat sims were not great about secondary effects and splash damage, the new IL-2 Series really pushes in the other direction. Vehicles explode and tumble, nearby telephone polls snap while the lines sometimes stay attached. In one instance, a train I was shooting at exploded with one of the tank cars being shot up in the air and hitting my low flying IL-10.

Oh yes, that’s a danger now!

So now, even a near miss or a strafing run that doesn’t appear to have caused any effects immediately, has actually caused a fair bit of temporary or permanent damage if you look closely. That’ll be interesting because air strikes now have a kind of suppressive effect on ground vehicles and targets.

I noticed the same for trains. In attacking this locomotive with bombs, I missed, but the blast did damage to the boiler a few meters away.

I haven’t had time or opportunity to attack ships in the new sim yet but I’ve watched other content creators work and here we really have something impressive going on. Ships can sink like before but they can also lose an entirely segment, like the bow, in a large blast for example. And you’ll see the doors on the ship open and sailors jump off into life boats or into the water to escape the sinking.

There are also bridges, dams, and more large suspension bridges with more subtle and nuanced effects that you can cause to them.

And you can definitely make out most of this while flying overhead. Even if you don’t look that closely, you can see the effects.

What I don’t have a good sense of yet are things like pressure effects and that sort of thing. Does a 500lb bomb landing next to a tank not destroy it but effectively take it out of combat due to pressure waves? Not sure yet. But it does interact with the crater so that’s interesting at least. And the craters are fully 3D objects now.

All of this sets up the new sim quite well with a ground attack experience that far exceeds anything else in the category – I feel safe saying that right now. No matter what the series does for their next instalment, the foundation is there for excellent ground wafare.

Ground attack weaponry

Going to Korea gives us a chance to experience some familiar and unfamiliar types of weapons that we just haven’t seen before with IL-2 Great Battles. Cluster munitions, napalm, HVAR rockets, and the mighty Tiny Tim rocket, stand out as some of the new entrants. These join some familiar options including standard general purpose bombs, various familiar RS rocket series on the IL-10, PTABS… you get the picture.

While the Red team really just have the IL-10, as a player flyable attack aircraft, Blue team has a tremendous amount of options. The F-51D, F-80C, F-84, and F-86 are all capable of ground attack with HVAR, bombs… the works.

The bottom line is that there’s good variety of weaponry and aircraft to support a ground war. Its not quite as varied as we get with the WWII offerings, that’s just the reality of the Korean War, but its still certainly a good mix.

For all of that, however, it does make me want to see player flyable Tu-2, B-29, B-26 Invader, and other larger aircraft. These incredible ground attack effects are certainly crying out for more player opportunities to engage with them at tactical and strategic levels.

Another preview!

I’ve got at least one more preview to come before early access hits so stay tuned for that! I’ll be doing a more general overview of what I’ve seen of the new sim.