Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is, like its predecessor, a big, ambitious game designed to let you fly over the entire frickin’ world in incredible levels of detail. In Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, I was able to take off from the small airport by my house and fly around my neighborhood, navigate around the city just from my knowledge of the area, and even set down right on my street. Imagine that level of detail for the entire world…with more features…and then a big ol’ but…
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024
Developer: Asobo Studio
Price: $70
Platform: PC (reviewed)
MonsterVine was supplied with a Steam code for review
The big feature of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (as if “flying literally anywhere in the world” isn’t a big feature) is career mode: Start at pretty much any airport in the world and begin an aviation career, starting with very basic trainers and progressing into whatever your heart desires. And they mean it: You get an avatar this time and can do preflight walkarounds before you even get in the plane. But it’s not a sandbox career mode: For example, if you want to fly helicopters and just helicopters, you have to grind credits and complete missions in various aircraft to eventually get to helicopters. It’s a progression career mode, which is the downside. The upside is the game opens up as you progress in your career and pick up endorsements, new aircraft types, and new mission types, so you go from flying rinky-dink little trainers to pretty much whatever you want…as long as you don’t crash into the ground and lose a bunch of credits, which is harder than it would seem.
The Microsoft Flight Simulator series has always been pretty freeform but in addition to career mode, there’s been a pretty concerted “stuff to do” push. There are “activities” like training missions, races, landing challenges, altitude, and stunt challenges. There’s a “challenge league” which is a competitive mode with various flight challenges, leaderboards, and rankings, if you ever wanted to fly general aviation competitively, for some reason. And, of course, Free Flight, where you can fly anywhere you want in a finely detailed reproduction of, you know, the whole damn world.
So with all that and a fairly spectacular 2020 version that earned a 10/10 from IGN (and a year end #2 Top 10 Game of 2020 from yours truly), why is it being called “an unplayable mess” and getting review bombed?
Much like a plane: Live by da cloud, die by da cloud. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 launched with server and performance issues because too many people wanted to play it and much of the game is in da cloud. They’ve been working on sorting it out, but it’s still a very demanding game that requires a beefy internet connection and, obviously, a server infrastructure to support it. Still, there are long load times and it is fairly resource intensive, to the point that Rock Paper Shotgun looked into the bandwidth it uses (the 11GB or so initial download is just the beginning).
Hardware-wise, we’re talking about a recommended system with 32GB of RAM, an Intel i7-10700K or AMD Ryzen 2700X, and an AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT or NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080. My system meets or exceeds all of those requirements and it was still seeing slow load times and running on Low and chugging. Us ancient folk might remember the days when you’d actually have to upgrade your machine to play a game, but in 2024, talk about a throwback.
But on the other hand…there’s not really a competitor, except Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, so what else are you going to do? It’s a gorgeous game and when it all comes together and you’re soaring over the Grand Canyon or crashing into the street in front of your house or doing low-level stunts in an F-18, it hits like nothing else. But you’re going to need a big, beefy machine, a nice, steady internet connection, and the favor of…THE CLOUD! HAIL CLOUD! I dunno, I’m starting to think this “put everything online and make it dependent on massive server infrastructure” thing was a mistake.
The Final Word
It’s good when it works, and if your machine can handle it.
– MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
