Taken a few too many tips from Tom Clancy games

[Lemming77]

I recently got my hands on Birds of Prey, after having bought IL-2 1946 over Steam not long ago, and it looks to me like what's happened here is what happened to the likes of Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon years ago. While the first was more of a hardcore simulation, this is more dumbed down for the 'casual gamer'.

Graphics, I'm gonna be brutally honest about. BOP's adopted this ****-ugly colour palette consisting of different shades of brown and black. Sometimes it'll get so dark in a town that targets become very difficult to distinguish, whereas everything was always crystal clear before. If anything, this is a step forward in technology which took us a step backwards in gameplay.

Every now and again I'll hear people say something over the radio which doesn't seem appropriate for the given context, and is just intended to break the silence. Which it does. But to be honest, having some wanker shouting "What're you waiting for" when all I've got left to do is land at the airfield which happens to be about 50 miles away isn't the smartest feature to have.

The controls is really bothering me too. I quickly got fed up with using a PS3 controller, so bought a PS3 compatible joystick. The problem with this though is the game didn't adjust the deadzones to be something more appropriate. And in the end this turned out to be more difficult to use than the PS3 controller.

But the strangest thing which has happened is there's no PC version. Besides me being crabby about having a £120 Saitek X52, and £160 TrackIR I'd like to use with BOP, IL2 established it's entire original fanbase on PC. Why leave them behind in favour of PS3 and Xbox?

The game's been fun so far, sure, but disappointing at the same time. It feels like child's play compared to 1946.