Gaming

Il-2 Sturmovik Final Expansion

admin February 23, 2025

Most flight simmers would struggle to call 2024 a good year. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 had a troubled launch in November that it is still struggling to come back from, and study sim darling DCS World has been stuck in a legal battle against one of its bigger subsidiary studios.

To help kick away the bad juju surrounding flight sims, the 1C Game Studios team behind the Il-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles series has announced a lovely farewell expansion to its franchise.

In the series’ 367th developer diary, the devs announced the upcoming release of the Defense and Liberation expansion. Rather than focus on one specific map in one time period, the new DLC doubles the fun.

Defense and Liberation covers the battles for Leningrad and Odessa in 1941 and 1944. As the name implies, each map will have one campaign focused on Operation Barbarossa in 1941, and another covering the liberation from German occupation in 1944.

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Although the new expansion will come with the traditional 10 new aircraft, the distribution is slightly uneven as the game already features most major Axis aircraft in other packs.

For the 1941 campaign, Soviet fighter pilots get the I-153 biplane, the LaGG-3 s.4, and the Yak-1 s.23. Meanwhile, the Axis side gets the Bf-109E-4 variant of Messerschmitt’s iconic fighter.

The 1944 lineup is more varied. Ground attack enthusiasts will fly the 1944 version of the Il-2 with the iconic swept wing, and the 1943 Ju-87D-5 dive bomber.

After years without multiplayer parity between late-war German and Soviet fighters, the latter will finally have access to the La-7 and the all-metal Yak-3 s.9.

What’s The Future of Il-2?

Defense and Liberation is the eleventh and final mainline expansion for the Il-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles series.

The 2013 franchise started as a modest spiritual successor to Oleg Maddox’s Il-2 Sturmovik series (2001).

Through multiple leadership changes, Il-2 Sturmovik: Great Battles released expansions focused on the WW2 battles of Stalingrad, Moscow, Kuban, northwestern Europe, and Normandy.

1CGS also returned to its WW1 series with the Flying Circus series and tried to compete with other tank simulators with Tank Crew, centered around the 1943 Battle of Kursk.

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After leading the charge in the realistic WW2 air combat revival, the developers now turned their eyes to the East.

In June 2024, 1CGS confirmed the new project would be set in the Korean War, a critical part of history frequently overshadowed by both WW2 and the Vietnam War.

The developer team, now under the leadership of former development manager Daniil ‘Han’ Tuseev, posts regular updates to the upcoming game’s site.

1CGS has not committed to a specific release window, but developers have expressed they hope to have the game out by the end of 2025.