Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 review: a luxurious vision of flight sims, let down by some Ryanair execution
before this year Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024developer Asobo had a big achievement in 2020: they found a way to make flight simulator The game feels not only relevant to a mainstream audience, but vital. At least in that weirdest of masked, doomscrolling eras, we were all budding pilots exorcising cabin fever from confinement by exploring a virtual Earth from above.
Comment information
Platform review: personal computer
Available for: Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
release date: November 19, 2024
Technology – some dark magic that pulls Bing The map data coming from the cloud via Microsoft Azure is compelling enough to make even those who’d never dreamed of buying their own cockpit stop what they’re doing and pay attention. The problem, of course, is that there aren’t many games to play.
That might sound unfair for a game that lets you fly around an entire planet with nearly every known airport available for takeoff or landing, but it’s true. Beyond a few scenarios and challenges, the experience is up to you to shape and define Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020.
Asobo’s 2024 follow-up focuses on solving this problem, introducing a new career mode that’s so deep and varied that you can even play it purely as a business sim, instead of completely Not taking into account all actual flying. But if you do that, you’re missing out on – deep breath – firefighting, search and rescue, helicopter cargo, air ambulance, agricultural aviation, mountain rescue, parachuting and aerial construction missions, each of which requires a different discipline familiar with numerous cockpits and Flight model.
This is where the developers can really show you what all these ambitious streaming technologies and map data are capable of. The locations have been carefully chosen to be both gorgeous and offer just the right amount of flying challenge. It’s an absolute treat and an extremely savvy addition from a studio that doesn’t have to go the extra mile to impress. In an era when most simulators just throw a few new vehicles into the mix and tout “improved physics,” Career Mode provides a clear mission for the sequel. This will keep non-hardcore gamers in the game longer and maybe even drive some flight stick sales.
failed to take off
Now for the… unpleasant stuff. Career mode remained a mystery to me during launch week, not because it was particularly difficult to understand, but because I simply couldn’t access it. In my 16 years of reviewing games, I’ve never had such a bad launch problem. For the first 24 hours, I couldn’t even tell if the game had fully installed; all I saw was a confusing maze of loading screens.
On the rare occasion that I did manage to fly the plane in that launch window, I was greeted with flip-book frame rates, random crashes, a plane that seemed to have a life of its own, and more soul-destroying loading between menus screen, and poorly calibrated pad controls.
The strangest of them all are certain landing challenges – and this persists into the current version – where the plane suddenly and unsettlingly changes direction before you can control it, turning a simple test of skills into a mind-boggling battle. A painful plane crash, with every warning indicator ringing in your ears as you try to control the plane in time to avoid land. Both strange and nightmarish.
Loading screens are now much faster. (Technological) crashes have almost diminished. But even on my 1GB internet connection, I frequently encountered outrageously low-resolution textures, and the impressive view lasted far too long. Streaming media technology driven Flight Simulator 2024 It simply cannot support the ambitions of many users for the game. I hope this will change, but in the process of reviewing the game, I can’t simply assume it will, nor can I ignore such a poor launch experience.
The first rule of flying club…
Now that everything that needs to be said has been said, we can return to the main text. Where else is new? flight simulator Building on its predecessor? Well, the airport is significantly more detailed now. This is just auto-populated content, not the custom content Asobo offers in the various higher-priced versions of the game. Vehicle and personnel traffic is higher, and the overall experience of takeoff and landing is more immersive.
The flight model has also been tweaked. I must admit I didn’t notice this when using the control pad, but with the HOTAS flight stick you can get a much more detailed feel for how the aircraft reacts to your inputs and surrounding weather conditions. It’s especially satisfying to feel your gentle inputs rewarded and fly with more precision through increased responsiveness.
Of course, there is a “but”. Especially with the pads, and also with the flight stick, it took me a long time to dial up assist levels that made sense, and often left me confused with unresponsive controls or confusing input results , these results boil down to: don’t know they are turned on and b) I don’t understand how it works.
the best bit
Virtual tours have always been a strength of the series, and when everything works, scenes look sharper, better tessellated, and more accurately rendered to scale than before. Take a look at Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring, the Pyramids of Giza and Lisbon’s Pena Palace and you’ll agree.
In a way, it comes with the territory. Airplanes are very complex things, and my hobby of flying commercial aircraft only exacerbates this phenomenon. Can you imagine using an Xbox controller to actually drive such a behemoth? What would that feel like? It’s terrible. Confusing. A bad idea. Imagine boarding an airplane and watching the pilot charge the controller before takeoff. You’re about to get off that flight. With that in mind, the game does an excellent job of mapping such a complex array of instruments onto the pads and making it feel quite logical and responsive, most time.
But the truth is, until you figure out the characteristics of each plane, you’ll often get stuck in terms of assists and stamina. This confusing assist situation also masks a weakness Flight Simulator 2024flight school mode. Learning to fly is the core activity of this experience, and dedicated tutorials should go much further than that. More importantly, they should explain which accessibility features are turned on by default and let you experience what it’s like to fly with those features turned on and off. They also don’t pay special attention to your performance in each class. It was nice to get a grade in the end, but I got a B for a horrific near-death test and what I considered to be a near-perfect surgery.
The most fun I ended up having was in a slightly less forensically minded experience, not trying to understand the subtleties of an Airbus A330, not trying to put out forest fires in the most commercially efficient way, but taking pictures.
capture it
World Photographer Mode is designed for players who just want to capture the best parts of the stunning world map. You take a short flight to a picturesque location, take photos based on some specific criteria, and enjoy the scenery. It’s meditative, effortless, and demonstrates the beauty of technology.
It couldn’t have been a worse takeoff, but now Flight Simulator 2024Once airborne, the real work begins. Here’s a blueprint for a fantastic experience that will satisfy the needs of hardcore sim players and aspiring real-world pilots, as well as casual players who want to experience incredible technology without having to earn a degree in aeronautical engineering. Career mode is a real surprise, full of customizable experiences that reshape this simulation sandbox into different shapes.
But this blueprint has not yet been fully realized. I won’t pretend to understand the vagaries of how Microsoft’s Azure cloud data streams actually make this game work, but I can say unequivocally that it currently can be summed up as “not meeting expectations.” Even after some emergency patch work, there are still serious, serious performance issues – using alt-Tab this game is dangerous – and they don’t let you enjoy it at all Flight Simulator 2024of the best quality.
Should I play Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024?
Play it if…
Don’t play it if…
Accessibility
Never shy about adding menus and options, Flight Simulator 2024 Features a range of popular accessibility options, including a text-to-speech feature that allows players with different settings to communicate, and an in-game text chat translation tool that serves the same purpose.
There’s on-screen narration, subtitles and adjustable HUD opacity, as well as scalable text size. Luckily for anyone who suffers from motion sickness, you can turn off camera shake, too.
A range of different input options are available here, from keyboard and peripheral input to old-school mice and keyboards, including a “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 for improved visibility.
How do I rate Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024?
I logged about 20 hours of flight time using either device Xbox controller or a Logitech G X56 HOTAS, divide that time between flight school, career, world photographers and surprisingly eye-catching landing challenges.
This virtual cockpit is mine gaming pcthrough my output to a 30 inch monitor RTX 2080TI. It’s not a resource-hungry game, but I generally found connection speed to be a bigger determinant of performance than the GPU, whereas its predecessor seemed more constrained by native hardware capabilities.
The first review will be in December 2024.
