Cannot really say whther IL-2 is nice. Played it ecently with my 1 gig 384 meg system.
Lots of choppiness. Seemed excessively sensible to control input, but maybe I can adjust that. View system horrendous. Not saying one should have Linda Blair 6 views, but the system in IL2 is not very good. It adds artificial difficulty to the game because in real life we have two eyes and 3d vision, which means a bar or something half a meter away won't obstruct an object two meters away.
I have the feeling that this is the general approach in IL2 - make it realistic. DO it by the numbers. But then forget about important issues, which results in more unstable plane, too hard gunnery, too big muzzle flames on 109, too much of a resource hog.
The tracers are divine though, and graphics are very good. Good attention to detail.
But I cannot really evaluate it til I get a much better system. 5 fps when I was attacking Russian bombers in my 190. Oddly enough the gunsight was so far to the left I could only see a small bit of it, so that mae firing a bit harder. Probably me not setting it up properly. But I need a bigger system before I can play it properly.