It’s safe to say, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has had a real turbulent launch and right now continues to do so. The launch was literally unplayable with thousands of players keen to get hands-on the shiny new title which ultimately crashed the game’s servers in the first few days. If you were lucky to get in, the game would often hang, get stuck, not load and the user experience frustration grew.
The issues stem mostly from the fact that the latest Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is being streamed directly to your platform rather than downloading a terabyte of plane and world data. Cloud gaming works but that doesn’t mean it’s bulletproof. There’s huge advantages with this method of delivery, especially coming from someone who had to endure massive patch downloads and long load times (sometimes 1-2 hours) from Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, so delivering a title like this where you can hop in within 5-10 minutes is a huge feat however the launch showed us the disadvantages.
Before I get into the nitty gritty of my review, I’m currently on gigabit internet so streaming 4K isn’t a big issue for me. Quite in fact, having gigabit internet or higher in Australia has only really been a recent thing and not a lot of the population has access to fibre or even NBN. Having a title that relies heavily on cloud will shut a lot of players out, I just can’t imagine myself playing this on anything lower than my current download speed.
Once you get into the game, you’ll be greeted with a character creation screen, albeit not a fully fleshed out one but a welcome addition to creating your own pilot to take through the game and career mode creating an immersion into the world of flight sim. From there, you can take it to the skies.
There’s a few things MSFS2020 players will be accustomed to and that’s mostly the challenges and the world map. If you didn’t know already, Microsoft Flight Simulator allows you to drop a pin anywhere on the world map and you can start flying from that point taking the real-world sites backed by technologies such as Bing maps etc. You’ll see the roads in your neighbourhood and possibly your house; while not 1:1 – it’s sure damn close and a crazy feat in technology. People still get shocked when I show them this mode.
The career mode is the biggest selling point of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, you pick a starting airfield; literally any airfield in the world (personally I just picked somewhere down the road) and your pilot career starts from there as a company hires you. You’ll get a series of introductions in Career mode from basic takeoff and landing to more advanced scenarios before taking on more certifications which opens the doors to different career missions. Your life as a pilot is to complete the jobs to earn money and use that money to upskill your licence until you become a multi-class flyer.
Once you earn enough, you can even start your own aviation company which opens the doors to actually managing said company and maintaining your own fleet. This is probably the biggest step up and welcome addition to Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 giving the title a sense of purpose rather than just flying around in all the different planes you can get your hands on. While I managed to dump a few hours into the career mode, the game’s bugs and server issues often barred my progress and also increased frustration when things didn’t load in properly, planes missing landing gear (yes it happened twice now) and controls just not responding. These are all bugs that CAN be fixed and once they are, I’ll be definitely sinking most of my playtime into this.
Behind the curtain both technological and visually, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 surpasses the expectation of the previous title. They took the core sim and not only managed to make it look better but overall bring extra life to the already amazing world map with added terrain, textures, effects and more. I was quite scared my PC wasn’t up for the leap from MSFS2020 but the team did a great job with performance in this iteration; quite possibly thanks to the cloud technology. The title performs well in 4K with my ‘starting to age’ RTX 3070 graphics card which was quite surprising.
The little aspects of improvement like better lighting and minor things like debris effects especially landing airliners and seeing things like snow on the ground get kicked up, or watching a dust trail your plane as you glide down the runway; it’s the minor things that visually brings out the immersion of being in the real world.
Weird at first but Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 allows you to take a stroll on the ground with your aircraft. Yes, you can take to the land and explore the scenery around the environment but also find fauna and just take in the sights. Walking around the aircraft also allows you to perform pre-flight checks (just like real pilots) if you want to give that extra level of simulation.
While a technological marvel when it works, the Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 user experience is far from ready and often smacks my face with a wall of frustration despite loving almost every bit of the new sim. Career mode seems to have a lot of issues when things often don’t load, and this is where my title kept freezing to the point my progress won’t even save anymore and I had to redo it over and over again. Sometimes bugs would happen in missions resulting in you failing it.
There’s also lots of controller issues with my playthrough where I spent half my time talking to other players and figuring out why Turtle Beach Flight Velocity HOTAS setup would often reset or simply won’t register half the time with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. I had several issues and each of them being unique which frustrated the experience even further. Weirdly, I had no issues with the setup in the previous title so I was hoping for a clean transition into this but that wasn’t the case.
At times, sticks would weirdly respond, thrusters wouldn’t register, brakes didn’t work all of a sudden etc. It was a wonky experience and the UI for setting up controllers and equipment is oddly way more frustrating than it should be. Sometimes the mouse would disappear and not register – it was unpleasantly annoying to stop mid flight to reset settings again.
There’s a path of redemption for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 however as most of the issues stem from cloud and lack of polish, I can see the greatness it possess and potentially can be that title we want in the near future however at the moment – if you do decide to jump into it, you may crash – literally.
