In Britain at least, Desert Wings β Tobruk's release couldn't have been timed much better. Convincing yourself you're buzzing WW2-era North Africa in a sweltering airborne sweat lodge is much easier when your skin and flightstick are clammy with briny body dew.
Not that this generously proportioned IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover expansion is wholly reliant on real-world weather for its perspiration production. When it comes to beading brows and irrigating armpits, the unusually energetic bandits more than pull their weight. We've had to wait an awfully long time for a commercial combat flight sim rooted in the Western Desert campaign.
The unfashionable setting means a bevy of unfashionable aerodynes. Nestling amongst the BoB sortie sequences post-install are eight scripted mission strings featuring debutante warbirds and the km x km Tobruk-anchored map. What follows is an account of the first five sorties in the ten-scenario 'Desert Hawks' story. Pilots who flew it in these theatres came to value its almost vice-less handling characteristics, high dive speed, and general robustness.
When the Tomahawk's more powerful and better armed descendent, the Kittyhawk, came along, that respect and affection only intensified. Your second priority is to protect the lives and aircraft of your fellow pilots. Your third priority is to destroy enemy aircraft. As there seems to be no way to adjust the difficulty of Desert Wings' campaigns and it's a long time since I flew Cliffs of Dover or a Tomahawk, I'm not exactly brimming with confidence when I coax my steed into the air for the first time and turn its distinctive snout T he three ridges on the Tomahawk's nose are a supercharger intake flanked by two Browning 0.
For the next fifteen minutes my eyes dart from the gauges on the P's handsome clickable panel to the bland but framerate-friendly wilderness unspooling beneath my wingtips. I'm beginning to wonder whether Team Fusion's scenario designers have started the campaign with an anti-climax for the sake of realism and suspense-building when a string of combat reports sends my thoughts scuttling in a very different direction.
