The Kurland Map
The Kurland region has both a winter map, and for the first time in the IL-2 series, an autumn map. The autumn map sports some fall hues of brown in some of the fields that are not seen on any other map. To add to the ambiance, the autumn Kurland campaigns also have custom weather of less sunny days with more clouds and no thunderstorms.
Kurland
The Skins
As mentioned earlier, Ostfront comes with 106 skins for 39 different planes. All of these skins are impressive works. Although credits are given to the skin artists in the both of the .pdf files, it would have been nice if all of the files had within them their artist’s name. Of the skins that do have the artists’ name, I was particularly impressed with works of “vpmedia” and “csThor”.
One interesting feature of Ostfront is that many skins make it hard to know at a glance which variant of Russian plane you are up against. This presents a new challenge for players flying on the German side as you can no longer tell the enemy’s aircraft capabilities by its paint job anymore. Just as the German pilots had to do in real life, you have to look for things such as oil coolers under the nose to determine what you’re up against.
The Air Bases
Most of the air bases in Ostfront have what I would call an authentic, balanced look with logical object placement. As one would expect in real life, larger bases appear as though there is a lot activity with different plane types while the smaller and remote bases have less detail. The larger bases also have a good balance of looking busy while not cluttering the ground with too many objects and therefore choking framerates.
Over an Air Base
