Well it activates and works. made a new Steam user (as my old one gets used on my sons pc a lot); installs from DVD then when you run it it fires up into your Steam account and downloads a fairly big update, took a while, so watched the England match for 20 minutes
Frame rate is all over the place at the moment, but we've all heard why so wont go into all that, just hope the updates/patch coming by the end of the week maybe will make big improvements.
There's an absolute ton of control keys, not many with a default setup, just the familiar il2 ones for views, bail out, padlock fly-by etc.
Sound quality is variable, guns in the Hurricane sound oddly boxed in but loud, comms radio is difficult to hear and I havent seen any volume adjust for that, the audio setup is a little sparse apart from speaker selection, unless I'm missing something.
I havent really played about with the settings, it defaulted to my desktop resolution (1920x1200) and medium settings - my spec:
Q9650 @ 3.7Ghz, 4Gb ram, Zotac Amp 480GTX, SB X-Fi, Win 7 64bit
Changing the graphics settings requires a restart to take effect, I know most games require this these days, but it restarts through steam so takes a while, unlike il2.
I set it to very high just to see how it looked, my poor pc wondered what I'd hit it with
its very early days, after such a long wait following the development for nigh on six years, I'll take a deep breath and accept waiting a bit longer to see it sorted, I remember thinking in the friday updates ' give it me now, I dont care that its got bugs' well, careful what you wish for!
PS: The CE box is very nicely done, the spiral bound handbook has a really thick front/back to it, it would have been nice to see a list of available controls, like the old keycard in all the versions il2, not checked to see if there's any pdf's on the disc etc.