New To Cliffs of Dover - Initial Perceptions

[Heavy_Cavalry_Sgt]

I loved IL-2 and its expansions, but I had read review of Cliffs of Dover, so my expectations were low, and it was still a major disappointment.

Installation and startup were fine. I liked the loading splash screen of a stressed looking pilot. The Ubisoft logo has a hard time playing smoothly, and the menu music will occasionally loop for a few seconds.

The cockpits were a mess of flickering purple and red and pink, as were some of the parts of the aircraft. Depending on the aircraft, about a 3rd of the view was obscured by a black band. I should not have complained about that if I knew what was to come.

For some reason, the screen shots have the control panel looking normal, instead of strobing psychedelically.

I'm not sure who this woman is or why she thinks the Spit is a two seater. Is she a flight attendant? After trying to play the game for a bit, I needed a drink.



In WW2, there was no need for xrays. People are hollow, and you can just look inside to see if there is a bullet or a broken bone or something.



I was trying to make a water landing, and hit a little hard. Fortunately the Spitfire flies perfectly will without wings. In fairness, this was before I discovered that there is a "silly ground collisions" on/off switch. The key problem with flying the plane this way is that if you run across an enemy, assuming you can see him with the restricted field of view, is that you might want the guns that you left behind in the wings.



Water is much less dense than air, which is why you can sit in the water with the engine running flat out and not damage anything or generate any thrust. Or maybe it is just less dense for a propeller, because hitting the water is bad for the airframe. I have no idea how ships in IL-2 are propelled. Maybe they have special propellers made out of the wings of crashed airplanes so that water has density for them.



The stewardess remained very calm when the Spitfire became a noisy life raft instead of a airplane.



Anyway, I didn't have the frame rate problems others had reported even with the graphics settings maxed out. I found my graphics drivers were out of date, so I fixed that.

No more acid trips in the cockpit, but the frame rate dropped to an unusable level. I turned the graphics settings down to lower values, then lower still, then all the way down. The graphics are not quite as good as the IL-2: 1946 family, but the frame rate is okay unless there is something other than blue sky in your field of view. Trying to take off, I go from a tail down position, to folding back propeller blades in something less than 2 frame. (one frame everything was fine, the tailwheel was about to come up, the next frame things are broken and the tailwheel is nearly back on the ground).

Realistically, the acid tripping cockpit was hideous but it was preferable to the low frame rate, and at least the ground was pretty. The game was playable, and the instruments are mostly too small to be useful anyway. Wanna know how fast you are going? How high? How fast? Nope, sorry. IL-2: 1946 had a little info black that could be displayed that answered those questions at a glance, like most flight simulators. If that exists in Cliffs of Dover, I have not found it.

Firing the machine guns is reminiscent of some really great games from the late 80's and early 90's - fuzzy dashed lines that project out from the wings towards the targets.

My take on cliffs of Dover is that it is the most expensive 5 frames per second game of any type that you can buy.