Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Review

The simulation video game genre can be a difficult endeavour for any studio to tackle. We've had simulations that skew towards the casual, such as DiRT, Farming Simulators and The Sims, and those that cater to the hardcore, including iRacing, Arma 3, and IL-2 Sturmovik. The majority of the sim-focused market has always been on PC due to the flexibility and depth of available control inputs, but over the years the genre has been expanding to include consoles. One of the most notable and innovative entries in recent years was 2020's Microsoft Flight Simulator. It was a return for the franchise after more than a decade away from the spotlight, and while there was some initial turbulence, the title made an impression. Four years later, the sequel has arrived on PC and Xbox Series X|S, and unfortunately this metal bird needed more maintenance before takeoff.

The most impressive and distinguishing feature of Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 was the fact that the developers wanted to include the entire planet in the game. And miraculously, they achieved it. Players were able to jump in to any point on Earth to begin their flight, either in the middle of the ocean, or taking off from any of the millions of airports and airstrips. It was a striking technological and design feat, offering a vast scope of gameplay space that remains uncontested. Trying to deliver so much data was of course not without some challenges, as the game rapidly ate up hard drive storage space, and needed cache space to download / stream assets on demand depending on where players chose to fly. There were plenty of areas that were clearly lacking detail and accurate satellite data, or data that would stream in too late, resulting in muddled visuals and broken shapes. Still, the developers did a great job with continuous free updates to improve the detail of cities and airports over the years. The old game marking adage of "you can go anywhere" was finally achieved.

For MS Flight Sim 2024, the entire planet is still at your disposal, but there has been a key shift in the design that proves to be the game's tragic undoing. Rather than continue to exponentially grow the demands for disk space, the new title instead chooses to dynamically stream and download the majority of its assets on demand. This now includes most of the terrain, buildings, weather, and indeed even the aircraft themselves. While this approach results in significantly reduced hard drive space, it also means the experience is severely degraded in quality if either your Internet connection or Microsoft's Azure cloud servers are having an issue. Obviously, this also means it's not possible to play offline at all.

In real world terms, this new streaming-first design made for a tough launch. After servers were so overloaded on debut that we could not get into the game at all, things were just as disappointing once we were able to start taking off the next day and over the course of the past few weeks. While the whole planet is available in Free Flight mode, still with its impressive and vast amount of data, including airfields, scheduled commercial flights and real time weather, the quality of the imagery has suffered substantially. Assets take forever to stream in, and for the majority of the time they are of poor quality. From shapes of buildings, to terrain textures, and staff walking around the airport, many objects look like they are from the days of MS Flight Simulator X over a decade ago, that's assuming they load at all beyond some rough polygon shapes that are animated at half-framerate. Even static scenes such as indoor areas during career mode cutscenes are streamed in, as you observe textures loading in late and objects popping in and out of view. The first impressions when jumping into any kind of flight are simply awful. There is already a large number of pauses and lengthy loading screens – the game should have taken longer to load more assets, instead of rushing to show off another fancy transition from menus down to the planet.

There is also no real way to improve things as of now. The console version doesn't offer any kind of visual setting adjustments, but you can set a limit on the size of the rolling hard drive cache, as well as bandwidth. It's worth noting that players with slow Internet connection, or monthly data caps, will be struggling with this title due to its new streaming design. In our experience, using the Xbox Series X console hard-wired (not on WiFi) and running on a 300 Mbps down / 150 Mbps up connectivity, with no other devices on the network, produced a largely disappointing experience. There is a warning that may pop-up when the game detects a bandwidth, but we've never had it flash, so things are supposedly working as expected. The game always feels like it scrambles to load assets, and is never ready in time for you assuming control. To truly rule out issues on the console, we tried playing the game through Xbox Cloud Streaming via Xbox Game Pass, and even using Microsoft's own cloud servers to host the game, the performance was still very disappointing and visuals subpar. Perhaps one day, the developers will bring back the option to download assets instead of streaming everything in, as the game's settings has references to this.

After some initial stuttering, things stabilize a little. Maybe you get lucky and the immediate area is not very heavy on details (think an airfield in the middle of nowhere in Asia, instead of New York City or Tokyo). That should load with decent quality and speed, and framerate doesn't take too much of a hit. After you take off, you might finally get to appreciate the newer and better-looking clouds, as well as the improved lighting on the ground below. From ten thousand feet in the air, the game does finally start to look really pretty at times, the further you get away from the details on the ground. Although MSFS 2020 was a similar experience in this regard, 2024 fares better simply because there are admitted improvements to the visuals while in the sky, and because the quality gap is that much larger with the ground level. And while you can take some decent static photos, the game looks worse in motion as it suffers from a severe lack of anti-aliasing on the aircraft, with most objects and terrain on the horizon producing a hazy and shimmering effect.

Free Flight mode is a rather familiar experience to what the previous game offered – it's an endless open world sandbox where you can fly and explore anywhere. It remains an impressive game space, and if you didn't first experience it in 2020, it will initially be quite mind-blowing. Players can purchase new airports, planes, and visual liveries on the Marketplace, and returning fans will appreciate content compatibility with the previous game, though as mentioned the feature is not yet functional. The included aircraft selection out of the game is decent, with various single props, heavy cargo airliners, an expanded selection of helicopters, and even hot air balloons.

For new pilots or those needing a refresher, the training missions are still included and do a decent job of introducing the basics. There are more tutorials this time around, that go in-depth with various advanced aspects of flying, as well as different types of aircraft. Hardcore players will appreciate the detailed interiors of all the aircraft, and thousands of functional buttons and levers that all correspond to their real-world functionality (within limits, of course). New for this year is an addition of the pilot tablet, which you can bring up and interact with to review the flight plan and the map, as well as other vital information, and make changes to the itinerary.

You can fly with a supported joystick, or a mouse/gamepad controller combo on PC, or just a controller for a more casual experience on Xbox. Using a controller can certainly feel rather unwieldy at first, and the analog stick lacks the precision for extremely smooth landings, but even without enabling the available extensive gameplay and autopilot assists, you can get the hang of things pretty quickly. Menu navigation does remain quite daunting and takes getting used to, especially remembering the shortcuts. The developers for some reason decided to get rid of the cursor-style navigation for most menus, so you are tabbing and moving around with less clarity.

Between flights, MSFS 2024 also has a new ability for players to actually exit their aircraft and walk around the area. This basic function adds a few things to the experience – there are now pre-flight interactions, as you can walk around the plane, move its flaps, and remove safety tags and wheel blocks. You can also walk around the area just to get a more immersive look at wherever it is you have landed, whether in the middle of a city or in a jungle with potential wildlife. This adds a bit more immersion and expands the feeling of scale and freedom. But unfortunately, the potential for ugly and half-loaded terrain and assets will often hinder the visual quality of such walkabouts. The visuals at ground level was one of the weakest aspects of the previous game, and so while it's admirable that the developers chose to double down on it. But with the new streaming approach to assets, this inevitably backfired.

The sequel also brings a lot more structured content, compared to the sandbox environment of the 2020 game. Some of the returning content includes The World Photographer mode that prompts players to take specific photos of various famous landmarks around the globe, and when it works (i.e. the textures and objects all load-in at a high quality), it makes for a great avenue of discovery and inspiration. There is even a bit of challenge, as some photos require specific conditions such as time of day, alignment of structures, and angle of the shot. The Activities mode returns with the extended Flight Training, as well as familiar Rally Races, Low Altitude flights, casual Discovery flights, and Landing Challenges. Two types of Air Races are not yet available.

The Challenge League mode is a new addition that offers weekly competitions. Players are given three challenges to attempt, which are taken from the Activities mode. You are also seemingly grouped into a leaderboard with what seems to be totally random other players, as they do not feature your friends and there is no toggle for local or worldwide standings. As you clear the challenges of the week and try to earn the best possible score, your leaderboard ranking is adjusted according to how the others in your group are performing. If you place in the top part of the standings, you get promoted from Bronze league into higher divisions over the course of a Series that lasts multiple weeks. This is a purely competitive mode as there are no prizes or perks being given out regardless of your rank or league level. Those who want a casual flying experience together can still meet up in a lobby and meet in the world, just like in the previous game.

Perhaps the biggest new addition is the inclusion of a Career mode. Here you get to create an avatar, and start on a path of growing your pilot reputation, earnings, and skills. Your avatar gets a choice of a few rather crude pre-made faces and basic body types, and so does your co-pilot. The game adds a bit more focus on the presence of people in the game, through this personal and co-pilot avatar creation, livelier workers at airports, and even the ability to turn around and see the passengers in their seats, and even walk back there on some aircraft. However, the human models are of rather lower quality (assuming their load properly at all), so this added immersion is short lived.

The game also features lots of voice chatter, from the ATC interactions and training instructors, to the people that you deal with during missions and your direct client passengers. All of this dialogue is very basic and generic, and is possibly randomized and AI generated. What is for sure AI-generated are the voiceovers, which range vastly in quality from somewhat passable to extremely stiff, lacking in proper delivery, intonation, and confused by punctuation or unique names. It's understandable that voice acting could not be possibly used for the thousands of randomly generated missions in career mode, but the quality of the final result is often off-putting. AI writing and voice acting like this is certainly not going to put real people out of a job anytime soon.

After creating your avatar and doing a few test flights/tutorials, you are set free to start doing missions. Although the game makes you pick a starting airport, this seems trivial, as new missions appear all over the world and you can fast travel and accept them anywhere. The initial missions involve taking folks up for their first flight and doing a circle around a point of interest, or delivering an airplane between hangars. Later missions involve things like search and rescue, putting out wildfires, taking people up to skydive, doing private cargo and charter flights, and more. The contextual variety is good, but it all boils down to taking off, flying to a destination, and performing some kind of mini-game like activity, and then returning for a landing. In sightseeing you are tasked with maintaining a set distance from the point of interest, and staying below certain speed. Dropping people off for skydives has similar requirements, but flying in a straight line instead of a lap. Putting out a wildfire means again flying at a certain altitude and dropping the water with good timing; similar goes for picking up an advertising banner off the ground to take into the sky. All of these missions are initially fun to execute, but do grow a bit stale because they are randomly generated and yet the same every time; at least you will see tons of different airports and places in the world while performing them.

The missions can all take anywhere from 20 to 60+ minutes of real time flying, and they include pre-take off, taxiing, and clearance processes every time. While hardcore players may rejoice at what is a possibly exhaustively long career mode, most will be thankful that many segments of the missions can be skipped. You can skip all the steps before actual take-off, and even the long flight to the destination of the mission can be skipped. This makes the missions more of an acceptable length of around 10-15 minutes. You are graded on various aspects of the flight, but usually it's all about meeting the minigame parameters (speed, altitude), and smooth landings. The better you do, the higher your awarded performance rating, which increases your profile reputation. If you don't skip parts of the mission, you also get a bigger credits payout, and more experience.

Experience level is one of the criteria for unlocking new mission types, but flying well and earning credits is much more important. You earn anywhere from a measly 500 credits to 2.5k credits for a mission, and that money can then be used to pay for 10-15k certification exams. The exams test your skill with new and more powerful or extra functional aircraft types (turboprop, heavy cargo, hoist, etc), thus unlocking more missions. Still, the game is quite heavy on the credits grind, as it takes hours to unlock new mission types, and earn enough to try purchase another cert exam. And after you hopefully pass, it takes time to recoup the money spent on the exam attempt. It's worth noting that the certifications have two separate paths, one for airplanes and one for helicopters, which have their own mission types and exams. It takes a very long time to feel like you're making a dent in your career progress, all while you fly repetitive missions with some annoying AI generated characters that ramble in amazement at seeing their hometown from the sky.

After about 10 hours, you might make enough money to start your own company, which lets you buy your own aircraft. But before you get too excited, this also means extensive repair costs for any landing rougher than butter, which eats at whatever higher earnings you've made. While your first plane is sold at a discount and you may get insurance for it – should you crash, it will be gone for good, and to earn enough money for a new one is simply daunting and may very well be the quitting point for many casual pilots. You do make more money by flying with your own plane, and after earning enough, you can buy a second plane and let the AI fly it on missions for some passive income – though the game doesn't explain this with enough clarity, and you may need to resort to online searches, like for many other things.

As we circle around the traffic pattern of this review, we must return back to where we took off from, the technical issues. While much has been said about the impact of cloud-based game delivery in terms of terrible visuals and performance, MS FS 2024 unfortunately also struggles elsewhere. Before even getting into the pilot seat, the game's menus are sluggish at best, and navigation can be troublesome. Some of the options don't seem to work or keep resetting, including crucial elements such as stick sensitivity adjustments. We've also experienced a few complete game crashes in gameplay and even in menus – including about 45 mins into a long-haul flight.

There are also plenty of problems with a general lack of polish. Some career mode missions spawned the plane on top of a hangar or upside down, which was counted as a failure, and attempt at a restart resulted in an error message; returning to menu, we were penalized with a huge chunk of reputation loss. Even just starting out on the very first career flight, the mission script got broken so that the passenger we had to take for a ride was not able to get into the aircraft, and was stuck outside, walking through the wing. No amount of restarts of the mission or the game solved this bug – we had to delete the entire career save file, as this was the first mission and no others were yet made available. When these passenger sightseeing flights finally work, you may often encounter a bug that shows the clients sitting upside down, under your aircraft.

When using the skip feature, you may find the result to be unpredictable – such as being penalized for not communicating with ATC (when you could not possibly, as that part of the flight was skipped), or deploying flaps at high speeds (while you are actually still on the ground), or the game spitting you out into the final descent at incredible speeds with no chance of slowing down enough for a smooth landing. If you choose to go around, you of course get penalized for abandoning the flight plan or taking too long (execution time is an actual metric on some missions, and also seems broken because taking huge shortcuts still results in penalty). We also could not transfer our owned aircraft to a different airport because the option simply did not do anything, and because there were no missions generated from the airport where it was located, the plane was basically unusable, and we were stuck flying as a contractor with borrowed planes and miniscule income.

Elsewhere, we could not complete a single flight in the Airbus A320 because the game would simply freeze each time we got into the cockpit, while the Boeing 737 MAX took off fine, but exhibited a funny bug that had its trim lever spinning uncontrollably, and the plane just amusingly bounced its tail in the air. All of these problems seem to relate to design and lack of polish, and can't be blamed on the cloud streaming.

On paper, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a decent sequel as far as content is concerned, with an expanded selection of activities that gives players more things to do in its still-impressive open world sandbox of our planet. But its all for naught due to the technical issues with streaming, and plenty of other bugs that make career mode punishing and frustrating on Xbox Series X. The scope and sheer ambition of the game remains remarkable, but the novelty has worn off, and the execution is just not able to keep up this time around. The developers possibly put themselves in a bind by naming this game 2024, as the title clearly needed much more development time. Fans are definitely better off sticking with the 2020 edition for now, as it will possibly take months to sort out the issues with the new model.