Gaming reviews
High-performance playtime
Do you ever wonder how it’d feel to take a few years away from games, and then peek back through the curtain once you’d become out of touch? Quite often, Microsoft Flight Simulator feels like that peek. In its scope and fidelity, it seems to be visiting from the future, when it’s commonplace to have access to a photorealistic Planet Earth and the freedom to explore it. When you can hop in a plane and fly over your own town, in the same weather conditions and lighting you can see outside your window.
What a dramatic way for the Microsoft Flight Simulator series to reappear, and what a towering achievement from Asobo Studio. We’ll be talking about the impossible detail of its 1:1 world map for years to come; reading retrospectives about how this piece of software changed environmental design; wandering around other games that harness petabytes of real map data and Cloud AI grunt as a matter of course. This is a seismic moment for PC gaming then. But what’s abundantly clear is that this is very much the beginning of Microsoft Flight Simulator’s journey, one moment on a roadmap that includes regular content updates on a monthly cadence and should by necessity also include just as many to fix some considerable teething technical issues.
A total of 20 planes are included with the standard edition at launch, comprising three airliners, two jets and fifteen props. Using any one of those planes, you can position yourself on the runway of any airstrip in the world, take to the skies, and see a startlingly accurate recreation of the region below.
It’s a premise with an appeal way beyond the flight sim’s usual remit. Who wouldn’t want to fly around in a playable, 4K, lightmapped version of Bing Maps with volumetric clouds and incredible weather effects? Who could resist the urge to try and find their own house?
Its approach to teaching you how to fly a plane isn’t that of a teacher, but a classroom. There’s everything in here you could possibly need if you wanted to learn how to set a flight plan with ATC, power up an airliner from scratch, set a VOR vector up to cruise altitude and then an ILS approach in order to land again at your destination. However lost you might feel in the captain’s seat, staring at a mass of blinking warning lights, you always want to figure it out. There’s such intrinsic satisfaction in piecing together the puzzle of operating an aircraft. After a few hours you’re raising the crash level and setting the source to BATT without even thinking about it.
An instant all-time-great. PHIL IWANIUK
An incredible exploration portal with even greater potential once its tech issues have been addressed.★★★★★