You can choose your own flight plans to travel between airports, adapting weather and time of day to your preferences. You can learn the ropes from extensive tutorials.
The danger, however, is that for these users the novelty will wear off given the limited modes of play. My sense is that console owners will prefer the tourism aspect of MFS. But if you’re that fanatical, the PC version will fulfil your needs better thanks to superior support for peripherals such as pedals and sticks. Nonetheless, the hardcore flier will revel in the authenticity of the simulation, which even on console apparently gives a fair approximation of piloting the real thing with a wealth of technical options. When you get low enough, the flatness of the terrain can also be distracting. The photo mode needs work – like much of the interface, it’s a clunky carryover from the PC version. Ireland is reasonably well represented in terms of detail, with landmarks such as Killarney National Park and Titanic Belfast easily visible. That will be the attraction for most people who aren’t aviation nerds – using MFS as a sightseeing tool to experience the Egyptian pyramids, Niagara Falls, Manhattan or, obviously, your own street. It’s a tantalising prospect – being able to fly anywhere in the world and marvel at everything from a low or high altitude. Microsoft Flight Simulator includes a wide variety of planes Some of this magic is achieved by streaming non-live satellite data to your console – though if your broadband has a data cap or is very slow, you can switch off that option at the expense of visual fidelity. Essentially, you have a high-res Google Earth flying machine at your disposal, offering multiples planes from a little Cessna to a gargantuan 787 Dreamliner.
The console version hews closely to its PC cousin, which can bring many a machine to its knees with its graphical demands.īut somehow the developers have shoehorned all that complex simulation and visual splendour into the Series X/S without much compromise.
What’s even more remarkable about the 2021 Flight Simulator is that it all fits on Microsoft’s latest consoles, the Series S and Series X machines that are still hard to come by in the shops. But given that the last edition came out in 2006, you can imagine most places outside the big cities resembled little more than green blobs in the game back then. Technically, of course, you probably could have done this in previous versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator (MFS). So of course my first joyride on loading up this remarkable encapsulation of the world from the air was to visit my house.