Year: 2009
Type: Original Soundtrack (OST)
Composer(s): Jermey Soule
Number of tracks: 12

★★★★★

Mediocrity from above

IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey sounds half like a stroke, but it's actually a long-running video game series about the eponymous fighter planes. At this point, I'll quote briefly from my favorite source, Wikipedia:

The Ilyushin Il-2 (Russian: Илью́шин Ил-2) is a ground-attack plane that was produced by the Soviet Union in large numbers during the Second World War. The word shturmovík (Cyrillic: штурмовик), the generic Russian term for a ground-attack aircraft, became a synecdoche for the Il-2 in English sources, where it is commonly rendered Shturmovik, Stormovik and Sturmovik.

wikipedia

Now that everybody is on the same page, I think it's pretty clear what the game is about: it's an aerial combat simulation. That's all I really want to say, because I didn't play the game, I just listened to the soundtrack, which was composed by one of my favorites, Jeremy Soule.

His experience with the universally popular world war setting from games such as Company of Heroes or Order of War also comes to bear in Birds of Prey. The listener is therefore offered the familiar range of marching music (Birds of Prey March), military epics (Chariots of Endearment) and heroic brass (The Engagement), which of course includes the obligatory calm-before-the-storm track Rain Ghosts. To break up the action frenzy a little, there is even a violin concerto reminiscent of Supreme Commander in The Great Death Mistress, which sounds quite nice. Unfortunately, as far as I'm concerned, there's nothing in the score that really sticks in your head the first time you hear it. For fans of the genre, there is more of the familiar.

No.	Title	Artist(s)	Ratings
01	Birds of Prey March	Jeremy Soule	4
02	The Engagement	Jeremy Soule	4
03	The Hunt	Jeremy Soule	4
04	Code of Honor	Jeremy Soule	3
05	Rain Ghosts	Jeremy Soule	2
06	The Great Death Mistress	Jeremy Soule	4
07	Theatre of the Delusionary	Jeremy Soule	3
08	Chariots of Endearment	Jeremy Soule	4
09	Hammer and Defeat	Jeremy Soule	3
10	Valor and Triumph	Jeremy Soule	4
11	Lament for a Pilot	Jeremy Soule	3
12	Victory	Jeremy Soule	4