Microsoft Flight Simulator is the most incredible experience I’ve ever had on a computer. The realism, the depth, the almost limitless replayability – it’s like nothing I’ve ever played before. It does so much to recreate the feeling of actual flight, at a level of accuracy never before seen, that there were times when I came in for a landing at real-life airfields I’d seen during my time in the Air Force where I was merely stunned. These are places I will likely never visit again as a civilian. Yet, as I gazed out the window during my final descent into places like Jacobabad, Pakistan, or Thumrait, Oman, I saw an approximation so close to what I remembered from all those years ago that I said out loud, “Holy shit, I remember this.”

The attention to detail in the plane interiors, rebuilt virtually using laser scans of the real things, manufacturing documents, and CAD drawings, is astonishingly precise. But it’s the integration with Microsoft’s real-world Bing map services that takes this incredible simulation into a whole new realm of freedom and realism. Granted, there are a few cracks in the picture-perfect facade in some of the more remote areas, and the buildings outside of major cities are built mainly with an intelligent algorithm instead of by human hands. However, it’s still absolutely wild how complete it seems. If you want to fly over your house, it’s there, in Flight Simulator, exactly where it ought to be. It might not look exactly like your house, but it’s there. I promise.

32 of Microsoft Flight Simulator‘s 37,000 Airports

The base version of Microsoft Flight Simulator comes with 20 planes and 30 hand-crafted airports. That might not seem like a lot of locations. Still, the remaining 37,000+ of the world’s airports are generated using technology sufficiently advanced that, to my eye, it is indistinguishable from magic. My local airport on the east coast of the United States, for example, is tiny and mostly unremarkable, but I was impressed by how close to the mark Flight Simulator came while I was taxiing to park my Cessna. Every building is in the right place, aside from a few smaller (less than 10×10′) outbuildings. It’s quite impressive.

The hand-crafted airports, built from scans and real-world blueprints, are even more technically awe-inspiring – I’ve never seen anything close to this level of accuracy in a flight simulation before. I like how developer Asobo Studios expanded the selection of “handcrafted” recreations beyond just the major airports. Sure, significant hubs like JFK, Seattle-Tacoma, and Heathrow are lovingly recreated in the base game, but smaller airports are also here. There’s even one in South America that’s no more than a strip of dirt cutting a swath through the thick rainforest. I wasn’t expecting to find such accuracy for these tiny, more challenging destinations, but I loved discovering them.

In a similar vein are the airplanes themselves – the level of detail is astounding. I can say from real-world experience, the cockpit of the Cessna 172 Skyhawk is perfect. You could snap a screenshot and share it online as a photo and, unless your PC is a complete potato, it would easily fool many people. (I know this because I did precisely that.) Asobo not only flawlessly recreated the look of the interiors and exteriors of the available planes, but the instruments are also fully operational. The Garmin digital instruments appear and function exactly as they do in real life because they built emulators for the actual software that runs them into Flight Simulator. This is the first game I’ve ever played where I downloaded a. PDF manual from a real-world piece of equipment to reference during play – and everything in the manual checks out to the virtual hardware. It excites the absolute nerdiest parts of my core.

Cruising Altitude

As unbelievably realistic as the flight simulation is, it’s also accessible to just about anyone’s level of flight experience. You can turn on all the assists and enjoy Flight Simulator in a more arcade-style, or turn them all off and approach a virtual sortie in the same way you’d do the real thing, checklists and all. As someone without a pilot’s license (I was an electrician in the Air Force, not a pilot), my personal preference is playing halfway between the full simulation and the highest assist settings because it still creates a very challenging experience but removes some of the mundane steps from the process, like pre-flight checks, engine start, etc.

Better still, since Flight Simulator is coming to Xbox Series X at some as-of-yet-undetermined point in the future, it controls well with just an Xbox One controller. The elevator controls are a little touchy on some of the planes using the analog stick but can be adjusted to suit your needs. Overall, I have no complaints about playing with the controller. It still requires keyboard functionality to get the most out of your plane, but there’s no immediate need to rush out and buy a flight stick or yoke.

Every Modern IGN 10/10 and Where to Play Them

That being said, the simulation is much more authentic and enjoyable if you do have access to a dedicated flight controller. I used Thrustmaster’s new Airbus A380 flight stick, in addition to my time with the Xbox controller, and it makes flying that much more immersive. Even planes with yokes are better with a flight stick, so if you have the means and find one, I recommend picking up a dedicated controller for the full Flight Simulator experience. Just keep in mind it’s not a requirement, which is an excellent feature for those of us who’d rather dabble in flying than make a significant hardware investment.

The 20 planes and 30 hand-crafted airports in the $60 base version of Microsoft Flight Simulator are already a respectable amount of content. These aircraft are run the gamut from highly maneuverable stunt planes like the Aviat Pitts Special S2S biplane to wide-bodied airliners like the “Queen of the Skies” herself, the Boeing 747-8. However, if you’re hungry for more, the $90 Deluxe Edition adds five more planes and five airports, and the $120 Premium Deluxe Edition adds another five of each, for a total of 30 different aircraft and 40 airports. Although the variety is excellent as an Air Force vet, I was a little disappointed that there are no military aircraft. I was holding out hope I’d get to fly a C-130 (my favorite airplane of all) or a C-17. An army trainer like the jet-propelled T-38 would also have been an exciting addition or even a ViperJet. If you want to fly a jet aircraft, the only option right now is a passenger plane, and that’s a bit of a bummer – but certainly not a deal-breaker. I’m not trying to knock the already impressive selection here, either; I’m just greedy.

With that said, I was perfectly content with the 20 planes included with the base game, and I don’t see the need to upgrade unless you feel you absolutely must get behind the controls of a 787-10 Dreamliner or a Cessna 152 or 172 variant.

Even with medium assists turned on, getting off the ground and back again in one piece requires a lot of planning, careful maneuvering, and tons of practice. There is a built-in “flight school” that puts you in the pilot seat of the Cessna 172, and it’s great. It helped me a lot with the terminology, best flight practices, and getting used to handling the aircraft. By the time I finished all the flight lessons, I felt utterly confident in controlling the Cessna and its maneuvers. The other planes operate under the same basic principles. Still, some of them, particularly the airliners like the A320neo and the 747, require many familiarizing if you even want to attempt a landing without a disaster. I wish there were more aircraft-specific training available for the other planes in the fleet, but there is a pretty smart AI you can hand the controls to at any time during your flight. I was able to learn a lot about the proper approach angle and landing speeds just from watching my AI pilot take over. (I expect YouTube tutorials will become a thriving genre as well.) And besides, if flying for the sake of flying is your goal, you can always turn on the assists to make it easier.

Final Approach

All of that gorgeous detail and accurately modeled equipment is on the inside. Still, Microsoft Flight Simulator’s absolute genius is actually outside the planes, enabled by its Bing Maps integration. Two petabytes (that’s 2,000 terabytes) of satellite and high-altitude photography are available to stream to your computer to accurately represent whatever part of the globe you decide to visit. The effect is mindblowing: I’ve flown places I’ve never been in my life, circling Machu Picchu or barnstorming between the Great Pyramids, and it feels like virtual sightseeing. But I’ve also flown to places I have visited to relive the travel experience, and have been thoroughly impressed. More than once, I’ve set off from my local airport and followed real-life roads through the Maine woods and into Quebec, retreading (re-winging?) the route I took last year by car. I’ve also landed on the tiny dirt airstrips in some of Maine’s remote inhabited islands, taking in the familiar scenery from 2,500 feet above the Atlantic Ocean.

You can even fly in real-world weather conditions with live air traffic, all of which are adjustable with in-game menus easily accessible during flight. If you’ve ever wanted to take off from an airport in a driving snowstorm at night, you can set the weather and time to your liking. One of my favorite things to do when flying is to adjust the time of day to the “golden hour,” early mornings or just before dusk when the sun’s rays are at their warmest and most pleasant. It makes for some incredible sights.

The Bing integration limitations come in two distinct circumstances: if your internet service provider has a data cap, and when the existing aerial photography of an area happens to be low-resolution. In the case of the data cap problem, you can preinstall locations ahead of time, so you load one small chunk of data rather than opening up the data firehose. Asobo seems to be sympathetic to this hazard and offers a setting in the menus to track your data use and set an upper limit, so you don’t go over your cap. After a few hours of play, including flights over San Francisco and New York City, I only used a few megabytes of data but multiply that over a few hours a day over a month (and flying over less frequently traveled areas), and it could become concerning. (Also, that comes after you install this 150GB monster of a game!)

The second limitation is with low-resolution maps, which show up in some of the more remote corners of the Earth, but it’s only noticeable at low-altitudes. I find the thrill of flying a few feet above the Colorado river more than enough to compensate for the lack of texture details on the Grand Canyon walls. Also, since the data is pulled directly from Bing, low-resolution areas will improve as its imagery database improves over time. At the moment, though, some places do look decidedly… PlayStation 1… when you’re up close and personal.

Friendly Skies

The act of flying and exploring some far-flung corner of the Earth is more than enough to keep me entertained. Still, Flight Simulator adds some competitive elements, including landing challenges. A rotating selection of remote and challenging airstrips becomes a place to showcase your landing skills, with scores assigned to your performance in categories like accuracy on the runway, roll distance, and bounce. It’s an enjoyable way to increase your skills, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to land successfully on a mountaintop airfield in France. While I ever top the leaderboards on these challenges? Well, for now, yeah. I have a few of the world’s top-scores for some of the landing challenges. Will this trend hold once the game comes out? No. God no. But will I continue trying to improve my scores? My inner competitor demands that I must!

Naturally, many of those attempts will end with you damaging or even outright crashing your plane. You might think you’re making a last-ditch effort to put your aircraft on the ground, only to discover (like I did) the landing gear on a heavy like the Airbus A320neo isn’t designed for non-tarmac use. For obvious reasons, a crash doesn’t result in a real fireball, but rather a black screen and a pop-up window that alerts you to your shameful performance – as if you didn’t already know. It does not just crash that cause instant failure: taking a plane well beyond its physical limitations, like an over-speed scenario, will also end your flight before you hit the ground. I found this out while first trying to do a barrel roll in a 747 and ended up descending too fast. That’s not to say you can’t do some sick stunts: you absolutely can make that 747 execute a successful barrel roll with a little practice – I did it a LOT. It’s just you can’t make a plane do more than it could do in real life.

Performance-wise, Flight Simulator looks great on my PC, which is no slouch but a few years old at this point. I’m running a Core i7-7700K with a GeForce GTX 1080 GPU and 32GB of RAM. Microsoft Flight Simulator set itself to “high” when I initially started up, but I did find myself turning down some of the lighting effects to medium to improve performance. That made it steady, for the most part, except that loading into one of the larger airports near a significant city slowed things down to a crawl, mightily when I tried to fly one of the bigger airplanes. However, the stuttering frame rate always mellowed out to a nice, pleasant clip after a few seconds, making for a smooth flight.

Where my PC struggles with Microsoft Flight Simulator, and I suspect this will be a problem for most people, is loading times. Big airports take a long time, sometimes as much as four minutes, in the case of Chicago O’Hare. Even remote airports with far less going on, taking at least a minute. I’m sure it’s not my PC’s fault because I installed Microsoft Simulator on a 1TB WD Blue M.2 NVMe SSD, and it’s hard to get a lot faster than that right now. It’s not surprising given the staggering amount of data Microsoft Flight Simulator has to load, but it’s still impossible to ignore all that time you spend twiddling your thumbs.

As frustrating as the loading times can be, once you’re into an area, it only takes a few seconds to restart if you crash or manually reset your flight. I didn’t mind the wait too much – it represents only a fraction of the total time I spent in the cockpit.

It also should be pointed out that, at launch, Flight Simulator doesn’t support VR, but Microsoft says it’s coming in a patch later this year. Just the thought of playing Flight Simulator in virtual reality has me seriously considering upgrading to a new headset. As incredible as it looks and feels on only my monitor, I want to immerse myself in the experience as much as humanly possible.