Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 review – delayed take-off or full air disaster?-Nick Gillett-Entertainment – Metro

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – it’d be even better if it worked (Xbox Game Studios)

It’s been broken since launch but Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is at least playable now, in one of the year’s most controversial releases.

There have been quite a few examples of abysmally poor video game launches over the past few years, where titles have released in a condition that’s unfit for human consumption. Skyrim was in a parlous state when it came out in 2011 and Ubisoft became infamous for ignoring its QA testers, with its nadir being Assassin’s Creed Unity. But the benchmark for broken launches remains Cyberpunk 2077, whose catalogue of glitches has by now become legend.

Interestingly, in two of those cases – and with a lot of patching – the games went on to become stone cold classics, but that’s certainly not guaranteed. It also makes reviewing a game like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 a challenge, since at launch, and for several days afterwards, it remained completely unplayable.

That was down to developer Asobo’s insistence on using streamed assets rather than downloading everything you need to your local hard drive, whether on Xbox or PC. That obviously reduces the initial wait and the amount of space the game takes up, but unfortunately it also meant that players who had spent anywhere from £70 to £200 – depending on the version of the game they’d bought – were unable to access their purchase.

Even now, with the game actually working, the initial load time will remind older players of cassette loading on the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum. You get music to listen to and images of various planes flying, but it’s a multi-minute wait every time you start the game, even if on Xbox quick resuming is a lot swifter. Or at least it is when it works. More on that later.

With the technical problems not so much out of the way, as in abeyance, it’s now possible to see what sort of game Flight Simulator 2024 is. That’s because, while it’s very much still a simulator, this release sees Microsoft’s flagship title devote itself wholeheartedly to the sort of gamification that had previously been anathema to the franchise.

The central plank of that is Career Mode. This starts with flight training, first in a small private plane, where you’ll learn to ascend, descend, adjust your throttle, and learn what the slip-skid indicator does. Pre-flight checks both inside and outside the aircraft, taxiing and take-off, are all covered separately, with your performance graded from A to C.

But that’s just the tiniest tip of the iceberg. After paying to take your private pilot’s license, you begin working on a commercial one, with the vast number of added complexities that come with piloting larger planes, your responsibility now including dozens or hundreds of passengers. You’ll learn about turboprops and jets, multi-engine planes, instrument rating, night flying, helicopters, cargo powered-lifts, and a whole lot more. The game is absolutely vast in its scale and intricacy.

As you do all that, you’ll open up new commercial possibilities for your career. Starting out working for a small aviation company, at whatever global airport you’ve chosen as your base, you work your way up from private aviation to cargo and passengers, search and rescue, and aerial firefighting. Eventually you’ll start your own business, ploughing the revenue you make back into the company to extend its reach and fleet of aircraft, as you continue to learn new flying skills.

It’s a fanatically detailed and long term process that includes financing maintenance of your fleet of planes, and although some of the instruction and testing will be familiar to players of past iterations, plenty is new. That includes piloting hot air balloons and a blimp, neither of which have featured in the series before. You’ll also be taught by an AI-driven trainer.

Whether this game looks like this or not is pot luck at the moment (Xbox Game Studios)

They will initially surprise you by being able to call you by your gamertag or registered name when addressing you, which is a neat touch. Their vocal delivery is generally serviceable, and certainly more than enough to communicate what you need to do next, even if it never feels quite right, the inflection and emphasis just wrong enough to be mildly off-putting. Given the extraordinary quantity and specificity of dialogue it’s presumably a way of overcoming those logistical challenges, much like the decision to stream textures from the cloud.

A large part of that is because the game now comes with a full digital twin of the Earth, letting you zoom right in on any part of any continent, taking off or landing on anything from a distant field to Heathrow, to rivers or lakes if you happen to be flying a seaplane. You can also now get out of your plane and walk, although your walking speed is also accurately simulated, making it feel frustratingly slow to players more used to first person shooters.

It mostly works. There are still frequent moments when textures fail to load, leading to everything looking pristine apart from a few rough-hewn polygons, or a ground area that remains blurry, its visuals perfect for flying over at 5,000ft, but looking like a fuzzy mess close-up. The same goes for its World Photographer missions, where you use a helicopter to capture particular angles of a global landmark.

That might mean capturing the sun above the Eiffel Tower in autumn, or taking a low angle shot of the sphinx in Giza. Generally, the monuments look great, perfectly rendered in 3D, while the surrounding buildings and streets are less convincing, clearly AI-interpolated from flat photographs and satellite imagery. It’s fine when you’re moving quickly, but when hovering the illusion is easily shattered.

Highway to the crash bug danger zone (Xbox Game Studios)

There are other technical issues. On Xbox we found the game was fond of crashing during quick resumes. The reflections on cockpit windows can go haywire when passing complex ground objects at low altitude, the illustration on the A10’s nose flickers wildly, textures pop in distractingly late, or a skyline leaps up where previously there was only a flat plain.

It’s highly likely these issues will be fixed, but more than two weeks after launch they remain extremely noticeable. If you look past them, there’s a lot of simulation on offer, the actual mechanics of flight proving endlessly deep and refined. Even using a standard controller, the difference between the feel of flying different planes is enormous, quite apart from the accurately modelled cockpit instrument panels and switch gear, which is compendious.

There are shortcuts for most things you’ll need to do, like releasing parking brakes or adjusting the trim, but we found we needed to leave tips on because remembering all the instructions about holding RB + X or LB + click left stick, was too complex and lengthy for us ever fully to get the hang of. Maybe with a few months’ solid play it would become muscle memory, but even over quite a lengthy review period, that point felt a long way off.

From its weekly challenges and global online leaderboards (none of which require Xbox Live membership) to the plethora of discovery missions and ways of gamifying trips around beautiful parts of the Earth, it may have a detailed flight simulator at its core, but there’s also now a huge amount of game built around it. This makes the experience both far more accessible to newcomers and more rewarding for players less concerned with accurately role-playing an eight hour transatlantic airliner flight.

We’ve always found some of the more fastidious elements of true simulators to be verging on the masochistic and it’s good to see so much work here in addressing the needs of a more mainstream audience. It’s fair to say all the really deep stuff, from accurately modelled chatter with air traffic control to the subtleties of piloting heavy-lift helicopters is all present and correct, but now there’s more to entertain than just ultra-geeky detail.

If this were a fully functional game as its developer intended it to be, it would be a stunningly impressive and well-rounded piece of software that manages to be practically all things to all armchair pilots. At the moment, at least, it’s not that. It’s a technically compromised but still highly playable halfway house, where long load times and constant, if relatively minor, glitches remain a significant part of the experience.

Formats: Xbox Series X/S (reviewed) and PC
Price: £69.99
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: Asobo Studio
Release Date: 19th November 2024
Age Rating: 3

It’s Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 that needs the medical attention (Xbox Game Studios)

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