Fair enough. PC owners have Oleg Maddox's to look forward to...sometime hopefully this side of the new century's debut decade, anyway.

And consoles deserve reasonably serious flight-sims, don't they? A gamepad's no more a gun than a racing wheel or a flight stick, right? With the glut of first- and third-person shooters, open-world action games, and mediocre-to-plain-embarrassing franchise tie-ins, why not spark a set-top flight-sim renaissance with something a bit slower paced than Ubisoft's blink-and-you'll-miss-the-target ?

It'll come down to how it plays, of course. According to publisher 1C, the game aims to be a World War II air and ground puncher (i.e. dogfight and bombing missions) tackling five theaters of war: The Battle of Britain, Stalingrad, Berlin, Sicily, and Korsun. Factor in 50 missions comprised of hypothetical and historical battles, a soundtrack by Jeremy "Oblivion" Soule, and a difficulty system that scales "from arcade to realistic simulation." Just how realistic remains to be seen, but my sense is that it won't be as authenticity-focused as Maddox's virtually period-peerless original IL-2 series. Fine with me, as long as pulling Immelmanns and Split S half-rolls properly nail-biting.

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