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Few flight sims capture the boredom of an airport like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. It’s not for lack of trying. Asobo Studio has all the starry-eyed ambition of a kid first dreaming of flight school. It has an engineer’s eye for aircraft, too. What it doesn’t have is a working engine. Between crashes, soft-locked missions, and entire forests and mountains failing to load, MFS 2024 is unbearable at best, and unplayable at worst. Despite the occasional glimmer of brilliance, something is sickening here, and it isn’t the turbulence.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Review
Take to the skies in the aircraft of your choice for a series of aviation adventures. Pursue the career of a pilot, grinding your way from bush plane nobody to veteran of the skies. Leave everything behind as you drift over the Alps in a hot air balloon. Take aerial photos of the pyramids and the Great Barrier Reef. Race to the top of the leaderboards in rally races, competing against other players and your own best time. Wait for missions and maps to load. Wait for assets that never load at all. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 could be an incredible game if it worked.
Story: One World, No Point
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 lacks a central plot, but it’s not altogether devoid of story. Career Mode lets your piloting career take flight at any of the game’s many airports, with a wafer-thin plot connecting your actions. Despite a handful of soulless NPCs populating the world, they offer no substantive dialogue. Their facial expressions and animations aren’t smooth or flexible enough to convey real emotion, either, but that’s only a small problem since there’s hardly any emotion to convey. These early red flags signal a deeper issue: MFS 2024‘s story doesn’t value people.
Taking back-to-back photo tours of oil rigs and the Great Barrier Reef with no critical eye for the connection between the two? That’s weird. Flying military aircraft over colonized land like it’s a Disney tour instead of a legacy of real-world imperialism, exploitation, and violence? That’s weird. It’s off-putting to see a developer take such pains to recreate the Earth without ever stopping to look at it. The detailing of the aircraft proves that Asobo has an expert eye for detail when it cares. It just doesn’t feel like it cares about people.
Gameplay: Waiting for Liftoff
A game’s tutorials can tell you a lot about what you’re getting into. MFS 2024 has a series of tutorials that walk you through everything you need to know about flying, and there sure is plenty. Virtually every button, throttle, pedal, gizmo, and whatsit you’d find in a real aircraft is real and functional, awaiting your (in)expert touch. You will flip switches and press pedals. You’ll pull and push on sticks. You will scrutinize the altimeter with the tortured brow of a wizard divining the kingdom’s fate from a cupful of tea leaves.
Whether you’re using a controller, M+K, or full HOTAS set-up straight out of MechWarrior or Steel Batallion, MFS 2024 is an unflinchingly fiddly and tactile experience. It’s the thing the game does best, and if all you want is to go through the motions to fly a variety of aircraft, the game delivers. Aligning your nose with the horizon, cutting the trim by a degree or two while you ease back on the throttle, plowing through the clouds, knowing that every little thumb-tap of the joystick is another meter climbed? Peak Flight Simulator. I love the game in these moments, but their highs only increase the fall damage to come.
There are rallies, photo tours, and curated experiences of every kind, and then there’s the map. You can fly anywhere in the world at any time, tailoring the weather and time to your exact preferences or grabbing real-time data. Forget landing a Boeing at Denver International. You can catch a red-eye flight to your home airport, dropping your landing gear and bumping rubber on a strip of scuffed cement you maybe walked a dozen times growing up. If nothing else, breaking nose-first through a stratocumulus cloudbank and seeing your old apartment, grad school, or favorite park is a trip that never gets old.
Loading times hit Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 like a brick in a turbine. Choose a mode and wait. Choose a certification and wait. One option is misleadingly called “Fly Now,” but I cannot. I can fly soonish, probably after five or 10 minutes. Yet when my flight finally loads, I’m greeted with a “Low Bandwith Warning,” despite my Wifi happily chugging along with every other game and app. Sometimes buildings and rivers spawn where they should. Mostly they spawn in the way, blocking runways and drowning airfields, or don’t spawn at all. Normal loading times don’t bother me. These aren’t normal, and the payoff isn’t good.
Graphics & Audio: Absent Assets
Your CGS Hawk Arrow II bumps and rattles down the runway, preparing for liftoff. The pavement stands out like a burn scar on the body of the pine forest. Through the triangular window on the passenger’s side, you can make out an impossible river. It washes through a thousand trees beyond the runway but never touches them, their leaves unshaken despite the rush of ghostly water. Then you liftoff, and the engine’s hum rises with your wings.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is graphically broken but only sometimes. When the simulation is working, its sprawling forests, shimmering oceans, and twinkling cities can be astounding. The problem is the simulation mostly doesn’t work. Missing textures turn mountains into white slabs of undecorated fondant. Assets fail to load by the thousand, flattening boreal forests like the all-smoothing hand of an angry god. Sometimes the ground is puddy or Styrofoam, but it’s almost never ground. A game so reliant on sightseeing can’t have such ugly sights.
Getting all the assets to load properly is like herding cats, and I have neither catnip nor crook. The aircraft, mercifully, are an exception. Whether you’re flying high in a Cessna C400 or doing a pre-flight inspection of your Cirrus Vision, the planes, balloons, and helicopters all look great. The attention to detail is phenomenal, the instruments tactile, the glass and steel gleaming and perfect. If anything, the polish given to the aircraft only highlights the faults of their surroundings. These planes are like gold bars dropped in a dungheap, and there’s no karat count high enough to distract from the stench.
The audio’s story is much the same. It would take a more practiced ear than mine to know whether the Boeing F/A-18E Super Hornet and other aircraft sound right, but they sure sound good. The humming engines, whipping wind, and squealing alarms add a ton to an otherwise flat soundscape, especially in first-person. Whether you’re in a fighter plane or a jetliner, the cockpit’s an immersive place to be. The more you turn your gaze (and open your ears) to the wider world, the more disappointment creeps in.
Conclusion: Grounded
I experienced plentiful bugs, frame stuttering, long load times, and multiple crashes during my time with the game. MFS 2024 is an ocean-wide, puddle-deep flight sim with fantastic controls, meticulously detailed aircraft, and a broken world. Until Asobo Studio squashes bugs, cuts loading times, and restores order to its fractured planet, I cannot recommend this game, even to hardcore flight sim enthusiasts. It’s not worth waiting so long for an experience so poor. Your time and talents will be better respected elsewhere. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is available for PC and Xbox Series X/S.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (PC Reviewed)
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a detailed flight simulator with grand ambitions, dragged down to earth by technical issues that ruin the overall experience.
Pros
- Detailed instrumentation and flight controls
- Tons of gorgeous and interesting aircraft
- Lots of different gameplay modes
Cons
- Constant graphical problems
- Long load times
- Crashes and game-breaking glitches
