Before this year’s Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, developer Asobo achieved something momentous in 2020: they found a way to make a Flight Simulator game feel not just relevant to a mainstream audience, but vital. For at least a few weeks there in that strangest of masked-up, doomscrolling times, we were all budding pilots, exorcising our lockdown cabin fever by exploring a virtual Earth from above.
Review info
Platform reviewed: PC
Available on: Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
Release date: November 19, 2024
The tech – some dark wizardry that pulled Bing Maps data from the cloud via Microsoft Azure – was eye-catching enough that even people who’d never dreamed of buying their own cockpit stopped what they were doing and paid attention. The trouble was, of course, there wasn’t much game to it.
That might sound like an unfair thing to say about a game that gave you an entire planet to fly around, and just about every known airport to take off or land on, but it’s true. Outside of a few scenarios and challenges, the experience was down to you to sculpt and define in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
Asobo’s 2024 follow-up addresses that point with a laser focus, introducing an all-new career mode that’s so astoundingly deep and varied that you can even play it purely as a business sim and take all the actual flying out of the equation entirely. If you do that, though, you’re missing out on – deep breath – firefighting, search and rescue, helicopter cargo transport, air ambulance, agricultural aviation, mountain rescue, skydiving, and aerial construction missions, each requiring a different set of disciplines and familiarity with numerous cockpits and flight models.
It’s here that the developer can really show you what all this ambitious streaming tech and map data can do. The locations are hand-picked for gorgeousness and just the right amount of flight challenge. It’s an absolute treat and an extremely shrewd addition from a studio that didn’t have to go this extra mile in order to impress. Career mode provides a clear mandate for a sequel, in an age when most simulators just whack a few new vehicles into the mix and tout ‘improved physics’. It’s going to keep the non-hardcore engaged for longer, and might even drive a few flight stick sales.
Failure to take off
Now to address… the unpleasantness. Career mode remained a mystery to me through launch week, not because it’s particularly impenetrable, but because I simply wasn’t able to access it. n the 16 years I’ve been reviewing games, I’ve never wrestled with a launch quite this bad. For the first 24 hours I couldn’t even say definitively whether the game had even managed to fully install itself, such was the labyrinthine mess of loading screens that I was presented with.
On the rare occasion that I did manage to fly a plane in that launch window, I was greeted by flip-book frame rates, random crashes, planes that seemed to have a life of their own, yet more life-sapping loading screens between menus, and poorly calibrated pad controls.
Most bizarre of the lot are certain landing challenges – and this persists to the present build – in which the plane takes a sudden, unnerving change of direction just before you take control of it and turns a simple test of skill into a harrowing air disaster, every warning indicator blaring in your ears as you try to wrestle control of the plane in time to avoid terra firma. Odd and nightmarish in equal measure.
The loading screens are much quicker now. The (technical) crashes have all but abated. But even on my 1GB internet connection, I’m all too often greeted by heinous low-res textures where an impressive view should be for too long. The streaming tech powering Flight Simulator 2024 simply can’t prop up the ambitions of the game for many of its users. I hope that changes, but during the process of reviewing the game I can’t simply assume that it will, nor ignore such an abysmal launch experience.
The first rule of flight club…
Now that what must be said has been said, we can transition back into the content. Where else does the new Flight Simulator build on its predecessor? Well, airports are notably more detailed now. And that’s just the auto-populated ones, not the bespoke ones Asobo offers in the various higher-priced editions of this game. Vehicular and human traffic is much higher, and the overall experience of taking off and landing is much more immersive.
The flight model, too, has had a tune-up. I must confess I didn’t notice this when using a pad, but with a HOTAS flightstick you can feel a bit more detail about the plane’s reaction to your inputs and the weather conditions around it. It’s especially satisfying to feel the gentleness of your inputs rewarded and to fly in a more precise manner afforded by some increased responsiveness.
There’s a ‘but’, of course. Particularly with a pad, but also with a flightstick, it took a long time to dial in the level of assists that made sense, and quite often I was left baffled by unresponsive controls or confusing results to my inputs that were down to a) I didn’t know that they were turned on and b) I didn’t understand the workings of.
Best bit
Virtual tourism’s always been this series’ big strength and when everything’s working, the sights look sharper, better tessellated, and rendered more accurately to scale than before. Check out the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone Park, the Pyramids of Giza, and Lisbon’s Pena Palace and you’ll agree.
To an extent, that comes with the territory. Planes are tremendously complicated things, and my penchant for flying commercial jets only exacerbates that phenomenon. Could you imagine actually piloting such a behemoth using an Xbox controller? What would that feel like? Terrifying. Confusing. A bad idea. Imagine boarding a flight and seeing the pilot charging up his controller before take-off. You’d be getting off that flight. With that in mind, this game does a pretty marvelous job of mapping such a complex array of instruments to a pad and having it feel fairly logical and responsive, most of the time.
But the fact remains that until you figure out each plane’s characteristics, you’re often wrestling with assists as much as physical forces. This befuddling assist situation also belies a weakness in Flight Simulator 2024’s Flight School mode. Learning to fly is the core activity of this experience, and the dedicated tutorials should go so much deeper than they do. More than that, they should explain which assists are on by default and let you experience what it feels like to fly with them turned on and off. They’re not particularly responsive to how you perform in each lesson, either. It’s nice to get a grade at the end, but I’ve been given Bs for terrifying near-death ordeals and what seemed to me to be nigh-perfect procedures alike.
Where I ended up having the most fun was in a slightly less forensically minded kind of experience, not trying to understand the subtleties of an Airbus A330, not trying to put out a forest fire in the most business-efficient manner, but taking photos.
Snap to it
World Photographer mode exists for the player who just wants to take in the best bits of that astonishing world map. You embark on short flights to picturesque locations, frame photographs according to a few specific criteria, and enjoy the views. It’s meditative, non-taxing, and demonstrates what the tech can do beautifully.
It couldn’t have been a worse take-off, but now that Flight Sim 2024’s airborne, the real work begins. There’s the blueprint for a fantastic experience in here, one that satiates hardcore sim heads and aspiring real-world pilots and also caters to casual players looking to sample the incredible tech without having to take an aeronautical engineering degree. Career mode is such a pleasant surprise, full of bespoke experiences that remold this sim sandbox into different shapes.
But the blueprint hasn’t been realized properly yet. I won’t pretend to understand the vagaries of how Microsoft’s Azure cloud data streaming actually makes this title work, but I can categorically say that it can at present be summed up as ‘not as intended’. There are still significant, miserable performance issues even after some emergency patching work – alt-Tab this game at your peril – and they simply don’t let you enjoy Flight Simulator 2024’s best qualities yet.
Should I play Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024?
Play it if…
Don’t play it if…
Accessibility
Never shy of adding menus and options, Flight Simulator 2024 has a welcome array of accessibility options that include text-to-speech functionality allowing players with differing setups to communicate, and an in-game text chat translation tool to that same end.
There’s screen narration, subtitles, and adjustable HUD opacity, along with scalable text size. Mercifully for the motion sickness, you can turn off camera shake, too.
A range of different input options are available here, from pad and peripheral inputs to old-school mouse and keyboard, including the ‘Legacy’ mode that uses the old ‘90s control layout.
Finally, colors can be adjusted to accommodate protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia, and you can find high-contrast menu schemes to aid visibility.
How I reviewed Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
I logged around 20 hours of flight time using either an Xbox controller or a Logitech G X56 HOTAS, dividing that time between Flight School, Career, World Photographer, and the surprisingly compelling Landing Challenges.
The virtual cockpit for this one was my gaming PC, outputting to a 30-inch display via my RTX 2080 TI. This isn’t a resource-light title, but I typically found that connection speed was a greater deciding factor on performance than GPU, whereas its predecessor seemed more bound to local hardware performance.
First reviewed December 2024.
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