Iwas a little bit surprised to see that Gamespot decided to review CoD in its current state but the terrible score is not shocking at all. And maybe it even makes sense to write the review. After all people need to be aware of what they are buying. Here are some excerpts from the review, the ones I thought important.

Like previous IL-2 installments, this World War II combat flight simulator will benefit from a passionate community and the included modification tools. But that’s no excuse for the clearly broken state it was released in. The technical issues are a real shame, for underneath them is a solid and complex simulation that deserved a worthy package to showcase it. In time, Cliffs of Dover might soar. But for now, all but the most patient simmers should leave this damaged aircraft in the hangar for further maintenance.

 

Cliffs of Dover struggles to maintain a smooth frame rate on machines exceeding the recommended specifications. You can fiddle with the in-game settings, but doing so doesn’t always have the drastic effect you might expect, and it might cause unforeseen side effects that should have been noticed and fixed. The sudden jitters, drops into single-digit frame rates, and overall choppiness aren’t just annoyances: they make the game unenjoyable, at times bordering on unplayable.

 

IL-2′s cockpits look phenomenal, and the waters of the English Channel undulate authentically underneath your roaring Spitfire. Most everything else looks just so-so, from canned explosions, to low-fidelity ground textures, to bland buildings. The older Wings of Prey was not a proper simulation, but it set a high bar for flight game graphics using the IL-2 Sturmovik graphics engine, ironically enough. Cliffs of Dover is nowhere near that level of beauty, which makes the chugging even harder to stomach.

 

Cliffs of Dover thus creates an atmosphere of wartime dread, though the sound design has a tendency to undermine the authenticity. The smooth growl of the Messerchmitt sounds fine, but other aspects of the audio sound clearly synthesized, and some noises sound as if they were sampled from lawnmowers rather than enormous airplane engines. Cannons sound more like bongo drums than they do actual cannons, and some glitches are overly obvious (the scraping noise that continues to play after a crash landing, for example).

 

All storytelling is delivered between missions in a scrolling text window. The briefings lack proper punctuation and feature plenty of grammar errors, but they’re descriptive enough to make you want to see where the story might lead. But the RAF campaign is such a mess that it leads only to heartache. Mission objectives are often unclear, and you might fail them even if it seems you complete what the briefing asks of you. Not that failing a mission hinders you: you can continue to the next one regardless of what happens. There are sometimes hilarious disconnects between your actions and those described in the update that follows. To make matters worse, the campaign comes to an abrupt end just when the plot gets interesting; there is no conclusion, and several story threads are left hanging without resolution. Either the campaign wasn’t finished or a game-stopping bug brings it to an unintended end.

(Source: Gamespot)

More bad reviews for CoD, this time is Gamestar (a popular german videogaming magazine) to warn about the big technical problems of this simulation and advise against buying it. I hope something will be learnt from this terrible early release. Now, let the patches come and don’t kill the support.

The current retail version of the flight simulation “IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover” suffers from extreme technical problems. We can not test the game right now and currently advise against the purchase.

(Source: Gamestar )

Eurogamer Denmark refused to review CoD and posted an article with the reasons why they will not review it. To make it short, they consider CoD an unfinished product and they point their fingers at Ubisoft for pulling the plug and forcing the development team to release early.

If you know danish you can read it here otherwise you can read my (bad) english translation of some of the most important parts of the Eurogamer article. This is very sad. This sim had a lot of potential but it was ruined by the decisions of the publisher.

“When one of the largest firms in this industry sends a “product” to the market and it turns out it’s not a real product, but a flawed, half-finished piece of software, you’re obviously not really surprised. First there was Silent Hunter V, sent too soon on the street, and today we are again sincerely disappointed.

 

Warplane simulators like Il-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover are something we had been looking forward to - especially after again having become acquainted with it in today’s launch trailer. But now we’re sad. There’s plenty of fatal technical problems with the game.

 

The game does not recognize the joystick and the graphics have two separate problems. Even on Low settings, where the graphics looks like something from 1999, it’s not working. And it’s not because my computer is slow: Intel Core i7 with eight cores, 8GB RAM and an GTX275 card. Twelve months ago it was a pretty cool gaming machine, and probably should be able to run Cliffs of Dover on Low settings, do we agree?

 

There is also a problem with some incredibly annoying microfreezes, not having anything to do with framerates, which stops the game all the time for seconds. And an interface that is strange … and … and … Now we do not bother anymore.

 

What do you do when you want to review it? If Ubisoft really wants to do simulations, it must have respect and gratitude. There are not many others who do. But they shouldn’t if they can’t afford it and end up sending the products too early in the streets.

 

For Ubisoft: We love simulations but, out of respect for the talented team who created the game, we will not review the game now. We promise to look at Cliffs of Dover again when it’s finished.”

(EDIT: Neo, just corrected me in the the comments area. The article is from Eurogamer Denmark, not Germany. Thanks for the correction, I modified this post to reflect the changes.)

I have mixed feelings about this. There are important features missing and a lot of unanswered questions. I guess we’ll just have to wait the release date or maybe the next part of the developer’s diary.

PCG: Some simmers may be disappointed by the lack of a dynamic campaign. Is there any chance you’ll add one in a future expansion?

OLEG: Given the likely shelf-life of the sim, there’s sure to be dynamic campaigns created by third parties, as there was with the original Il-2. Dynamic campaigns simply can’t be historical and we don’t like rewriting history. Missions created lovingly by hand are always more interesting than those generated by a dynamic campaign engine.

(Source: PC Gamer)