I was fortunate to gain access to IL-2 Series Korea ahead of the early access launch starting today. It’s given me a chance to start to dig into the new sim and explore some of the new features ahead of the launch. We’ve learned an awful lot from the developer diaries over the last couple of years while the sim was developed but nothing replaces trying it out for yourself. Now that I’ve got a several hours in on this, I wanted to share my earliest thoughts on how its looking, feeling, and flying so hopefully you can make some informed choices on if you want to buy into early access now or wait and see how things are coming along before getting into it later. Let’s explore the next generation of the IL-2 Sturmovik series!

Sim history, the Korean War and flight simming in 2026

IL-2 Series certainly has big shoes to fill! The original sim remains a legendary title in the annals of PC flight simulating gaming and its been followed up by a somewhat tortured second generation with IL-2 Cliffs of Dover (which still lives thanks to Team Fusion Simulations), and a highly successful third generation with the IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles Series. Though none of the sims futures were guaranteed when they started their lives. All of them have lived on.

I still remember the earliest days of Battle of Stalingrad where the generally stripped back earliest version of the sim really didn’t feel like it was enough to compete with its successor. Of course, that all changed as the series progressed removing unwanted features and gaining wanted features and content that people wanted. With that in mind, I was curious to see how IL-2 Series’ first outing would come together and if it would feel like Battle of Stalingrad’s earliest days or if it would be something more than that. More on that later.

Portraying the Korean War is an interesting way to have a first outing as well. While the sim has needed to add some interesting layers right off the bat to make it a potential success, its also doing a war that is shorter and somewhat more constrained than the vast battlefields of WWII. The Korean War, though devastating in its own right, was just 3 years long, and the aircraft needed to provide for an interesting set of scenarios for a combat flight sim is considerably smaller.

While the developers have expressed desire to move back to WWII following their Korean War outing, portraying the start of the Cold War has its interesting layers as well and we’ve already seen more than a few asking for the series to expand into the jet fighter combat of the Vietnam conflict. That doesn’t appear to be the direction on hand, and the Korean conflict didn’t feature the radar and IR guided weapons that the Vietnam conflict did, but there does still appear to be that desire creeping in. Perhaps a crossover from those who have become enamoured with the hypothetical Cold War dogfights of DCS World.

That’s all of the big picture stuff but let’s look at some of the nitty gritty that I’ve experienced so far.

First steps and control bindings

You’re going to hear a common theme through this piece: This feels quite a bit like Great Battles but with an extra layer of polish that the previous generation just didn’t have. And that starts with the control assignment system.

On first start of the sim, the control assign system pops up with a series of generally helpful tips and a whole control assignment wizard that helps guide you through the setup and binding of specific and necessary controls.

It doesn’t overwhelm with every binding, so you will probably need to go back in and do more later, but it does get you up and running. It’s far more friendly to a new player than the previous effort and its clear that the designers have spent time thinking hard about how their sim appears to newer players. You can, as a veteran of the series, skip to the standard control bindings instead and after messing around with the wizard for a while I ended up doing that.

Now I did run into some issues with double key bindings for some controls and I ended up clearing out a lot of extra bindings until I got my controls into the state that I wanted them. This is unavoidable with complex sims.

Fortunately, the new control binding UI is far and away better than before. You can search, sort, group by category, and search by input. Its smoother, faster, easier and better laid out than before.

The user interface experience

IL-2 Series Korea feels to me like they took everything they did with Great Battles Series and revisited everything about it. A lot of the UI’s functionality is familiar but rethought with the benefit of decades of sim development.

What do I mean by that? Well, everywhere I look I see things that show me that they’ve not simply copied and pasted but rethought. Sometimes its been very similar to before but other times they’ve come to refine the experience.

Let’s take the armament selection screen for an F-80C as an example. It could have been the same as before but they’ve rethought the experience and there’s more useful functionality here with the ability to choose belting for your guns or the ability to filer and select specific weapon types (like a 500lb GP bomb). Its far better than scrolling down a very long list searching for something. This is typical of most of what I see in the user interface.

The multiplayer screen has some really cool new features that I want to see more of in action too. It still has the distance and direction ruler but now you can also put your own marks on the screen for all to see. Marks like “I spotted a fighter here” or “I’m going to be attacking this ground target in 5 minutes.”

There’s potential for online abuse here but the benefits for teamwork will be immense if people don’t get too crazy with it. The contrast also needs to be greater so you can see the purple against the other marked items.

The museum mode is built right into the main menu letting you click a plane, select another one, examine performance and historical data, interact with the cockpit, the stairs, pilot, armament layout and more. There’s a real sense of the history on display and its so seamlessly built into the main screen that I think I’ll be clicking in here often just to admire the airplane infront of me.

I’m a sucker for this sort of thing and it directly appeals to my sensibility as a museum wanderer. Kudos for that!

But the museum and historical aspect is just a piece of it. It also has detailed breakdowns of performance with the ability to compare to another aircraft so you can see how an F-86 and MiG-15 turn, climb, and reach maximum speeds relative to each other. It’s very smooth and slick though I’m sure it will be the source of countless arguments over the years.

Right now we don’t have the career experience online so single player is a bit limited with the quick mission builder (now called the Task Editor… no, I don’t love the name) and scripted single missions. There are just two right now but I hope they have plans for more soon.

The Task Editor also seems to only have the more basic scenarios, free flight, duel and skirmish. We don’t have the Advanced Quick Mission scenarios that IL-2 Great Battles now enjoys but I am hoping that we’ll see that come online during early access. That ability to fly quick missions remains one of the best things about the modern day iteration of the IL-2 Great Battles Series so I hope that’s not going to be a miss.

There’s just two multiplayer servers online for the press and they are very basic. There was no way to see how the new sim will handle large player numbers though this isn’t their first rodeo and I’m hopeful it’ll work as well as before. If the developers can do what we’ve seen with the current Great Battles servers, I’m sure we’ll see some interesting ways to play the sim very shortly after the series kicks off and the community has time to put things into play.

We’ll have to wait for the full release to get the full sense of what the sim is going to offer as overall experiences but I can already see that there’s a fair bit of new and returning experiences that have been thought about and adjusted to generally work better.

Visuals and sounds

The biggest change are assets and lighting. IL-2 Series Korea has seemingly rebuilt their entire asset library as I see a lot of familiar and new things but nothing seems to have carried over without being significantly updated and added to. From trucks, tanks, telephone poles, dams, bridges, and industry. Everywhere I look, I see brand new assets that were developed to support this experience. This also applies to the explosions, the particle effects, the people that jump from sinking ships, the artillery crews that go through a complete animation cycle, the much more detailed trains and ground vehicles, and the list goes on.

The other big change is the lighting system which seeks to keep up with the latest in the industry. There are a few moments where I feel like the system is overdoing things, like at sunrise where the sun is perhaps a bit “radioactive” and overly saturated but otherwise I feel like the lighting upgrade is really good. It certainly looks spectacular on all of the metallic aircraft! That part really impresses! So do things like city lights, airfield lights, and cockpit lights… really solid improvements there.

General visibility is also quite good and spotting aircraft seems better under most lighting conditions than before which is a big plus and a big area that I was worried about.

The weather effects are also improved and pair nicely with the lighting updates. Clouds have some more unique formations and do appear to have gone through an upgrade cycle as well, although they aren’t as good as the DCS system and it suffers from the same lack of localized weather and weather systems that DCS does. If you pick a specific cloud style, it will be that everywhere.

Now, The updated sim doesn’t appear to have gone all the way towards challenging DCS World as some effects and elements are still behind their closest competitor. From terrain to particle effects and explosions, there’s still a sort of artistic style here that feels consistent but it’s not groundbreaking either. Ricochet bullet effects and general ground impact effects from bullets don’t seem to be fully developed either and feel like they’ve actually gone backwards in visual impact versus Great Battles. That needs some work.

You may have heard some folks complain about the ground terrain and while there are a few problems I have generally been quite happy with what I see.

The terrain has a higher degree of detail than Great Battles and not unlike more modern DCS World maps with more autogen variety and better grass and vegetation at low altitudes. Cities are well fleshed out with lots of details including people that walk around and many more small details that that they didn’t have before. Villages, rails roads are generally naturally integrated into the scenery though they do still sit “ontop” of the terrain at times.

Now I have had issues when flying at higher altitudes where the terrain immediately below me has gone low resolution and generally looked quite awful. Then it pops back into high detail and looks better again. Weird. I feel like the detail system is just being overly aggressive and needs some extra polish to sort out.

Over to sounds where again everything seems to have been given a workover. There are some sounds that are familiar from Great Battles (the F-51’s stall warning buzzer for example) but there are also some new ones. The jet and prop sounds are still generated rather than real recordings so there are some limits there to how good they will sound but I’ve always felt like they made up for lack of real world samples with good sound interaction with the physics and modeling and so engine spool up and down sounds are well tied to what is actually happening with the engine of the plane you’re in. The new machine gun and cannon sounds are far better than anything from before.

I don’t love the new AI generated audio samples for radio comms though. The North Korean ones are ok-ish but the American ones are pretty atrocious. That may be bias because I can understand the English ones and I don’t the Korean ones…. but I’ve only been listening for a little while and they already annoy me. Something definitely needs to be done there with better samples or real performers.

Flight models

On the subject of flight models, I’m going to defer to other people (like Command T) who have real world aerobatic and flying experience. But what I will say is that the flight models do generally feel fluid, realistic, and every bit as good as Great Battles if not a bit better.

From the fluid stall experience to features like Mach tuck (which Great Battles had BTW!), the flight model feels familiar yet refined. Spins, stalls, snap stalls, sluggish controls at high speed, rudder effects and P-effects at low speeds and takeoff or landing… its all here. It feels good though it doesn’t push quite as close to what DCS does with some of its individually modeled aircraft. Still, we once again have a cohesive experience where every plane feels like it was done to the same level. That’s good for a combat flight sim.

Performance

Like a lot of dedicated flight simmers in the content creation role, I have a pretty good PC. It’s a Core i7 12700KF with a RTX 3080ti with 12GB of VRAM and I’ve got 64GB of DDR4 RAM in my system too. It’s a few years old now but its still pretty good and capable of solid 4K gaming. I don’t have VR due to a chronic neck issue so I can only talk to you about 2D gaming.

The new sim runs beautifully on my PC. I was a bit worried looking at some of the system specs that even this system would struggle but that has not been the case at all.

I didn’t spend a lot of time messing about in the settings and I haven’t pushed all of the details all the way but I had steady and solid 60fps gameplay locked in the entire time I was playing. I noticed a very slight droop over some of the more densely built up industrial areas but only slightly. I stopped worrying about performance and carried on with flying the aircraft.

Let’s talk about the AI

The biggest change so far is that the team have found a way to make big B-29 formations doable. That part is a big change to a mix of both aircraft systems and features as well as the AI system and it really works well. Interceptions were smooth and enjoyable versus the slow and sluggish performance that Great Battles would offer when large formations came together. That part of the AI experience is an advancement but elsewhere we have a more familiar experience.

The typical flying AI has changed for IL-2 Series Korea but its not enough of a change. According to the developers, they are about to enter into some significant changes to the AI system and I sincerely hope so because while the AI remains adequate its not anywhere close to the level that I think I’d want to see in a brand new sim that is setting the stage for the next 10+ years of combat flight sim development.

Its generally competent in doing things like taxiing, taking off, landing, and performing basic combat maneuvers. I think its even a bit more aggressive at firing guns and fighting its way through an air battle. But its also true that it tends to fall back into the same sort of faults that Great Battles AI struggles with. It can sometimes use vertical moves to fight successfully but it also flounders at the top and can’t capitalize on the energy advantage. It also frequently gets into turn battles that it can’t win. If that sounds familiar, its because it is.

The changes, so far, are very subtle however. If you were hoping to see a whole new AI experience right off the bat, I think you’ll probably be disappointed and I suspect that the AI issue is going to be the biggest issue for a lot of legacy players. It may be a make or break moment for some of you despite all of the other advances. I hear you on that! AI is important for single player and potentially for multiplayer PvE experiences as well so I do hope that we see some big changes here going towards the final 1.0 release later this year.

Aircraft overview

No time to do individual or detailed reviews of aircraft here but I did want to talk briefly about each one because I did spread my time across all of the flyable types.

F-51D Mustang

An old favourite returns with a slight designation change and some new tricks. The F-51D is a bit different from its Great Battles WWII variant with the rear facing radar warning system (it’ll let you know if someone is sneaking up behind you) and the ability to mount large numbers of HVAR rockets and bombs. The Mustang was used as a close air support aircraft in this conflict afterall… quite a change from its dominance during WWII.

La-11

I really want to spend some more time with this one because I was having fun. It is familiar in the Lavochkin line but also quite different with the updated cockpit, aerodynamics and overall performance. I was having so much fun flying it aerobatically… it’s not a jet so its on the back foot here but its well armed with 3 cannons. No fighter bomber options here though.

Yak-9P

One of the last production models of the Yak-9. Its at once familiar and almost boring but it should make for a familiar experience for many flyers. It’s still snappy and responsive, a bit faster than before, and reasonably well armed with a pretty standard Yak loadout. I don’t think it’ll be top choice for anyone but it certainly has a historical role to play.

F-80C

I loved flying the prototype YP-80 back in IL-2 1946 and this feels like a return to that classic experience for me. The F-80C is not the best jet fighter and its outclassed in big way by the MiG-15 but its competitive with prop fighters and it has fast and snappy controls. It has great fighter-bomber options with large loadout lists.

IL-10

The only true ground attacker for the Red team. It did have a limited service life but I think we’ll be extracting a lot more life out of the IL-10 than was done in the real world. For IL-2 flyers, its very familiar though the hinge opening canopy means that visibility stays very restricted during flight.

F-84

I suspect I will be spending more time with this than many other aircraft. Its not fully competitive with the MiG-15 so its not a challenger for the fighter duel but it can fight well enough as a fighter and it’s even better as a ground attacker with heavy air to ground loadouts (including the Tiny Tim rockets!) and a ludicrous arrangement of HVAR rockets.

F-86A-5

The classic F-86 Sabre needs little introduction. Its fun, its fast, it has great visibility, the six M3 .50cals rip up enemy aircraft, the optional radar gunsight helps dial in range, and it can do fighter bomber stuff as well as fighter ops. Going to be a big favourite of many.

MiG-15bis

This is the “meme machine” with its giant 37mm cannon, great performance, great overall visibility (except forward ironically), and classic status as the counterpart to the F-86 in the early jet war. I think I had the most fun flying this of any of the jets so far.

Final thoughts

It may be slightly reductive but I think at the end of the day what we have here with IL-2 Series Korea is the next generation of IL-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles. It’s generally all of the things that I loved with a lot of improvements on top from the better lighting to the upgraded assets and aircraft models to the far better UI systems and generally great polish all around. It adds to the experience of before with new large bomber formations and even better ground attack experience thanks to the all new physics systems. The sim even performs well which I was worried about!

It also drags some legacy issues in with it. That includes the generally not great radio chatter and the AI combat capabilities which are generally what they were before with maybe the smallest of tweaks. While it looks far better, IL-2 Series Korea doesn’t push all the way towards its closest competitor preferring to offer a slightly more stylized approach to its graphics. This has served them well over the years with a clean and cohesive style but sometimes I wonder if they haven’t quite pushed hard enough to make it truly next generation.

We’re still in early access here and so there is reason why this early impressions piece is not a review. I will save that for after the sim comes out in 1.0 format later this year. 1CGS have some time to still do some development and do it with the benefit of throwing thousands of flight simmers at it who will undoubtedly look over every nut and bolt that holds this sim experience together.

At the start I posited the question if this would be somewhat limited like the early Battle of Stalingrad experience and while I feel that it might suffer from a bit of that limited content problem, I don’t feel like it’ll be all that long before we see them rolling out the next 5 aircraft DLC and so one way or another we’re going to see this sim pick up more features, refinements, and content and I’m very curious to see how this comes together over the next several months.

We have a new IL-2 Series on the block and I think if it can solve a few legacy issues that will be a true successor to the line!