Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is the newest installment in the Microsoft Flight Simulator series created by Asobo Studio. Released on Nov.19, it is the successor to the well-acclaimed Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020. With many new features, such as hot air balloons, blimps, and a career mode, there are countless new things to explore.

Ever since I took my first flight, I have been interested in flying planes. Since I need years of experience to fly a real plane, the Microsoft Flight Simulator is the closest thing I can get. I have tried many flight simulators in my life, and this is definitely the best one I have played yet.

An aspect that they improved on from the previous game is the graphics. The new graphics make you feel immersed in the game, making it feel more like you are actually flying a plane and not just staring dead at a poor imitation of one. These new graphics have raised your computer’s requirements to a fairly high level, meaning a lot of people are having trouble running the game. I’ve been struggling to get over 50 frames per second (FPS), and the game tends to freeze when taking off or landing at night because of all the lighting effects.

One of the features these improved graphics benefit are the details they put into each and every plane and the world around you. It makes it feel like you are really in the cockpit and are flying the plane all over the world. Similarly, over three trillion trees are placed in their own regions, and animals are placed in their natural habitats using the models from ZOO Tycoon. Asobo Studios added in more complicated buttons and switches, but it pays off as you feel like you’re really starting a plane, especially in VR. Asobo Studio has partnered with Garmin to add a more advanced navigation system to all planes and make them feel more finished. While most of the time the in-game details are spectacular, it occasionally goes downhill because rather than keeping every file locally, they’re streamed straight from a Microsoft server.

I would love to say that Microsoft Flight Sim 2024 beat the stereotype of not starting off with tons of bugs, however, they had so many upon release that you could not even get into the game until days after the launch. This was fully not Asobo’s fault because they had only expected 200,000 people at the launch and got a lot more than that, causing the servers to not be able to handle the load. They tried to fix this by placing people in queues, but these failed because of an issue of not being able to load past 97 percent after waiting hours. Even now, there are many other bugs that people are finding. One bug I personally encountered is that sometimes, when you get into planes, there’s no engine noise. To fix it, you have to leave the game and rejoin. Despite these challenges the developers are working hard to fix all these issues with a new update coming every couple of days.
An aspect they added that their old games did not have was career mode. I find this mode enjoyable as you have to earn money through many different tasks throughout the world so you can unlock new licenses to do new missions. At times the money is so low for the time you are spending on one mission that it can take you several days just to unlock a new mission license. This can cause you to have to repeat the same mission multiple times just in a different place which at times can be really repetitive. The part of a mission being two hours does not help the repetitiveness because you cannot skip anything.

Overall, I would recommend Microsoft Flight Sim to many people as long as they are fine with spending time learning how to fly a plane. Many people like myself can use this game to find out if we would like to become a pilot or just try to find a new game to play. If you can find this game on sale or if you already have a game pass, it’s definitely a must-play.