IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover Release Date.

One of the most well respected series of combat airplane simulator games is the IL-2 Sturmovik franchise. The good news for all fans of this venerable sim is that a new game in the series entitled Cliffs of Dover has been scheduled for release now on the 19th of April 2011 via steam with Amazon pre-orders being fulfilled from the 26th.

If you haven’t played any of the IL-2 games then you are missing a treat. It’s not a true flying simulator in terms of piloting the aircraft in a realistic fashion, but for pure gameplay the series is superb.

In IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover you can fly more than 25 authentic world war 2 aircraft including the spitfire, hurricane and a number of German and Italian aircraft. A number of non flyable period aircraft will also be present in the game to add to the realism.

Maps are going to be huge and photorealistic, representing many cities in southern England, Northern France and Belgium. Highly detailed right down to the vehicles on the roads you fly over and excellent particle effects. All coming courtesy of a brand new game engine.

The online play is going to allow for epic battles of up to 128 participants which can go on for many hours or days. I personally can’t wait for that one, with so many planes in the sky you are really going to need your wits about you.

Specs for this game are pretty high, the minimum configuration at release time being for a 2.0GHz Core2 or Athlon 3800×2 CPU. 2GB of system memory and a minimum 512MB DirectX 9.0c graphics card.

**UPDATE**

IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover Released in Europe

Cliffs of Dover has been released in electronic version to the European market for download via steam only at present. If you’re looking for the physical media you are going to have to wait a little longer for it to hit play.com, Amazon or similar stores.

Preview Videos

I have come across a few preview videos to give you a taste of things to come.

This first video is the official game trailer recently released by the developers.

Next up the training flight video shows some great cloud particle, water and lighting effects.

The final video shows more of the combat side of the game. Again it is visually superb, the only thing I’m not so keen on is the wooden falling motion of the pilot jumping from his stricken aircraft.

This is one I’ll definitely be checking out when it is released in April, I’ll try to post up a review as soon as I can get hold of it and play it to death.

IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover orders are now being taken.