Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (2024)

Had a little play with this at a friend's yesterday and I love seeing how far the game will let you go before it breaks.

The fact I could land in my families garden, get out, walk down the drive and up to the house, and then walk back and open all the panels on the plane and try to take off only to crash and get out again to ditch the plane lmao.

There's something fundamentally very cool about how these games simulate flying through the real world. Passing over real-life cities and landmarks replicated at their proper scale with decent detail and real-time conditions, seeing something interesting in the distance and being able to just fly on over to it, it's very compelling and gives this a decently high floor on the quality of its experience. It hasn't really convinced me to dive deep into the depths of its simulation or explore all its possibilities, but I do enjoy it as a sort of tourism thing with an interesting challenge and learning curve.

Console players will find that basic flight controls feel pretty good on the controller, but the UI is a bit of a mess. They tried to make the PC UI work on a controller, and it just kinda doesn't, in addition to being buggy in ways that made me unable to read the options or even have to fully restart the game pretty often. I recommend playing on PC if possible, at least using a mouse for interacting with the UI. While simple flying around isn't too hard to get the hang of, this is a proper simulator with lots of details to learn. I think from a casual perspective, it could maybe benefit from contextually helping you out a bit more in the moment, but it definitely does enough to be playable without a ton of learning.

This entry offers a relatively fleshed-out career mode that organizes different training exercises and challenges into a pursuit of different licenses and career paths. It's not very well-presented, with choppy cutscenes and flat text-to-speech voiceover, but it's a nice way to give the game some structure if you plan to sink a bunch of hours in. There are also other modes that provide more curated and structured content, which is good, since as nice as it is to just freely fly around, sometimes you need to be pointed toward something interesting. Still, I do find myself gravitating more toward picking a location that I'm interested in and flying around randomly, and the game does a nice job presenting this stuff with points of interest marked and occasionally accented with special music.

Generally it's a fun game to play that looks great for what it is. Obviously my apartment building doesn't quite have as much detail as the Eiffel Tower did when I flew directly over it, but that doesn't make it less cool that I can actually do that at all. Water, sunsets, cities lit up at night, and more all are really pleasant to look at for sure. I can easily recommend checking it out even for people who are only slightly curious about exploring it casually, especially if they can polish some of the rougher edges in future patches.

Was looking forward to this one but this is a rough start to the experience. I stayed away from launch day as I heard about all the server issues. When I finally jumped in it seemed to launch and run okay though it was a bit sluggish to load everything.

My big issue was that my joystick (Thrustmaster) was recognized but had the most bizarre settings provided by Microsoft. The throttle is tied to the rudder so that when I throttle up the rudder moves to the left, and when I throttle down the rudder moves to the right. WTF? I opened up the settings and there are input conflicts all over the place with Microsoft's defaults.

It took me a while to diagnose the issue since I was using the in-cockpit view. I kept getting weird jarring plane movements I couldn't explain. Once I finally changed to the external view I could see that various control surfaces were changing when I didn't expect them to and were causing the plane to twist and nearly nose dive while still on the runway.

I am going to keep trying the game out because when it runs smooth it is fun, but please beware.

MSFS 2024 launched a few days ago and it's a shit show. People can't log in or even install the game proper (the steam install is basically just a launcher that then downloads the game assets). Those who can get in ar met with a whole slew of errors and loading issues. As expected, the game is getting pummeled by reviewers.

My simulation game senses are tingling and Microsoft have a new Flight Simulator coming out next month. Looks like people are conflicted with this one, it boasts more airports and more planes, but much of the content is "updated" flight simulator content from the last game in 2020. Personally it feels like only yesterday I bought the 2020 edition and I feel like I've barely touched it.

I like the direction they're taking the game in with a campaign of sorts that focuses on real life careers in the aviation industry. It feels like a natural progression from the modes that are already in the 2020 version like challenges and the scenic flights which act as a sort of tourist simulator. The 2024 version adds career paths such as; search and rescue, air ambulance, agriculture spraying, air advertisement, red bull racing etc. etc. It reminds me a lot of the direction that other simulators have already gone in such as Storm Works and the Mud Runner series with their expeditions game which focused on research and recon, and their upcoming game which focuses on road construction, infrastructure, and hauling.

I personally don't think four years is outrageously short in terms of moving on to a new game, although the nature of Flight simulator 2020 did give the impression that this was something which would be supported and updated for a long time, especially with the utilisation of satellite technology and other systems to constantly improve the world and data that could be streamed to your PC or console. Like others have already said, I would have preferred a $20 upgrade fee, but I guess they need to push out new games too. I need to look into what Microsoft themselves have said about Flight Simulator 2020 and what kind of support they're going to maintain (if any) as their new venture rolls out.