London Gatwick Airport is a uncommon shade of brown, unknown to both science and art. Brown that does not appear in the lithe spectrum. No easel contains this. It is a dusty brown, a damp brown, a heated and earthy brown that vibrates with the stinging scent of disturbed age-old moss where age-old forests once grew. Descending into the uninteresting brown of Gatwick from 33,000 feet is like flying in and out of Gandalf’s miserable cloak and landing in one of several hideous little magic sacs he holds against his testicles.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 perfectly captures Gatwick’s bronze. Along with the stunning natural beauty of Yosemite, the imposing imperial skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline, and the towering majesty of the Alpine peaks, this local, decaying patch of West Sussex is the most impressively realistic depiction of a place I’ve ever seen in a game.
If you’re familiar with the previous edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator, you already know how Asobo achieves an endlessly impressive, individual recreation of every square inch of the planet. Using the magic of cloud streaming, the flight simulator continuously streams several petabytes of Bing Maps data to your unsuspecting internet connection, blocking the illegal soccer streams of everyone around you but providing an incredibly exact slice of the world that you can fly and point at.
At ground level and where real 3D data does not exist, fine details such as houses, trees and hedges are guessed through aerial photography and dynamically populated by the ever-changing game engine, so that no matter what rural setting the pub where you were created looks (at least from a distance) as real and significant as Rome, Tokyo and Paris. Meanwhile, popular landmarks that cannot be faked through procedural generation, such as the Golden Gate Bridge and the huge glass egg in which the Mayor of London lives, have been painstakingly handcrafted by the few remaining visual artists employed in the industry.
This fantastic technical trick was a core feature of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, but it’s worth repeating what a unique spectacle Asobo created. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 improves on the sightseeing simulation with significantly greater detail, better performance and improved flight physics, and while the previous edition offered nothing more than gawking, the updated version offers plenty of activities to keep you busy. There are more challenges, more activities, a full complement of photo missions, and a career mode that is somehow more sprightly than what I’ve seen in Stone Quarry Simulator, Garbage Truck Simulator, and The Guy Whose Whose It Is To Separate Non-Recyclable Materials on a Conveyor conveyor belt in the recycling center simulator.
In Career mode, you can advance from a wet-eared beginner pilot at a painfully realistic pace. Your first dozen jobs came from other pilots who flew the plane somewhere and left it behind – either for maintenance or because they partied too difficult at one of those infamous pilot galas and had to take the train home – before you finally finished skydiving missions and tiny passenger flights. Collect enough currency and you can try to earn a certificate for more powerful and captivating planes and helicopters, which will unlock more specializations and modern mission types.
Focus your training on the helicopter skill tree and you’ll be certified in search and rescue and recovery operations, which is the biggest and most dramatic departure from classic flight sim fare. These missions involve traversing remote wilderness areas looking for injured hikers or maintaining a steady position floating 30 feet above a sinking boat in stormy conditions while plucking desperate sailors from rugged waves. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 now simulates rolling 3D waves rather than the flat surfaces of the previous edition, giving ocean missions a sickeningly realistic feel.
The real lift is triggered by giving a command to the co-pilot with the press of a button, but the lowering of the rope and the added weight of the injured cargo hanging below the helicopter all happens in real time and according to flight physics, challenging you to keep your whirlybird still as long as needed to fish someone out of the sea. These types of professional missions are typically a test of basic flying skills: a stable hover for helicopters, flat and low-speed flight for skydivers, or polished and consistent turns near the Arc de Triomphe for visitors. An extensive series of flight school training sessions will equip you with the skills required for each type of mission.
The game is tardy and tedious, but for all its faults, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s Career Mode gives shape to a free-form blur of otherwise aimless simulation. The game puts you in the cockpit of a takeoff plane, a Cessna 172, for so long that by the time you finally get a license to fly anything else – a field-hopping taildragger or a plane gigantic enough to crush an entire flock of geese – you appreciate the differences in the way they behave . Where before I switched seamlessly between passenger jets and gliders like an indecisive Richard Branson, never staying with either plane long enough to become familiar with it, I am now forced to reckon with the quirks and foibles of each over dozens of hours of flight. one.
The result is a simulation that feels incredibly richer and more satisfying, at least to casual pilots like me, all somehow despite the incredible wobble. Launch issues plagued Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, with players facing endless loading screens, mid-flight disconnections, and overheating Microsoft Azure servers, limiting detailed views to muddy JPEG blobs.
The bandwidth issues have largely resolved themselves, but there are still many more fundamental issues that need to be addressed. My admittedly remote airport is home to an abstract mess of creepy green obelisks jutting out of the ground like radioactive teeth, preventing takeoff and landing, while even more trodden spaces like Manhattan are often blighted by structures blending into nearby rivers and smearing ground textures across sides of buildings.
Passengers’ dialogue is read aloud by what looks like 1998 text-to-speech software, giving the mission’s constant chatter a hauntingly flat and robotic tone. Visitors will marvel at the awe-inspiring majesty of flying over Knutsford with the enthusiasm of a Roomba saying it has just finished cleaning the bathroom. On one flight, two passengers told of a birthday party they had attended at Grandma’s house far below, and their grim dispatch suggested that something truly unimaginable had happened there. Any concerns about AI stealing our jobs will be assuaged by unwelcome notions of what Grandma potentially did to the cake.
There are even less fun mistakes. Career mode and certain other activities allow time to jump to the next captivating part of the flight, reducing eight-hour flights to 20-minute tasks, but the transition will sometimes cause the plane to go into a stall or put it deep underground. Helicopters are basically inaccessible if you’re playing on an Xbox controller, and the complexity of mapping everything to a handful of analog sticks and buttons proved too much even for Asobo, who otherwise did a remarkable job of cramming various control surfaces onto the controller’s circumscribed pad inputs. Passengers will sometimes fall out of their seats and get stuck in the fuselage, which is bad news for them but somehow harmless to your reputation as a pilot.
But these problems are uncommon enough that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 deals with them over and over again, and the simulation begs for forgiveness with a constant series of the most astonishing postcard views you’ve ever seen. Whether you’re tearing through the clouds above Mount Rainier, flying low over the gin-clear sea of Saint Lucia, or descending one last time into the greasy miasma of Gatwick, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is an endless parade of dizzying spectacle.
