MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR
Available now on: PC
Price: $99.95
Reviewed on: Lenovo Y540-15IRH Out now.
In a year when we can’t fly anywhere, why not learn the basics of becoming a pilot from the safety and comfort of home?
The detailed and informative tutorials, which can take dozens of hours to fully master if you want to, probably aren’t enough to get a gig at Qantas. But they are enough to whet your appetite if you want to learn more, or help remedy a fear of flying. The game is so accurate that professional pilots who have been grounded during 2020 requested early access to keep their skills up.
While the original intention of the new Microsoft Flight Simulator was to take advantage of Bing’s 2 petabytes of satellite and mapping data to make the most accurate consumer flight simulator ever, it’s evolved into something even more meaningful in 2020.
My family planned on going to Portugal in October, and so I assumed my first virtual flight would be there to at least get a taste of what we’re missing. But instead I found myself trying to fly to my parents’ house an hour away. Being in stage 4 lockdown in Melbourne is tough, and just the sight of the familiar mountain in the distance was enough to make me tear up.
That’s where the true magic of the game comes in. My social media has been flooded this past week with friends taking screenshots flying over their home towns, or other significant places. The accuracy and detail of the real world that’s in the game is giving people ways to connect with each other and the world outside.
The only thing that stops this game from being perfect is that, while you can just leave autopilot on and watch your plane fly from one of the 37,000 airports in the game to another, taking control can be a challenge, particularly for the impatient who have no time for physics. Sure, that makes you a better pilot, which is the point of the game, but sometimes you just want to take a hard-left turn to see a cool rock formation without getting stuck in a rolling rol g spiral. p