Steve Hogarty
London Gatwick Airport is a rare shade of brown, known to neither science nor art. A brown that doesn’t appear on the light spectrum. No easel contains it. It is a dusty brown, a damp brown, a hot and earthy brown that hums with the stinging malodour of disturbed ancient moss where once old forests stood. Descending into Gatwick’s cloying brown from 33,000 feet is like flying under and up Gandalf’s wretched cloak and landing in one of the several horrible little magic pouches he keeps by his balls.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 captures Gatwick’s brown perfectly. Next to the stupefying natural beauty of Yosemite, the imposing imperial skyscrapers of the Manhattan skyline and the surging majesty of the Alpine peaks, this local rot-tinged patch of West Sussex is the most impressively realistic depiction of a place I have seen in a game.
If you’re aware of the previous edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator, you’ll already know how Asobo achieves its endlessly impressive, one-to-one recreation of every square inch of the planet. Using cloud streaming magic, the flight simulator continuously blasts several petabytes of Bing Maps data at your unsuspecting internet connection, collapsing the illegal football streams of everyone around you but delivering an uncannily accurate chunk of world to fly around pointing at.
At ground level, and where actual 3D data doesn’t exist, small details like houses and trees and hedgerows are guessed at using aerial photography and dynamically filled in by the constantly churning game engine, so that whatever backwater village pub you were conceived in looks (from a distance at least) as real and as significant as Rome, Tokyo and Paris. Popular landmarks meanwhile, ones that can’t be fudged by procedural generation like the Golden Gate Bridge or the big glass egg where the Mayor of London lives, have been lovingly handmade by the few remaining human visual artists employed by the industry.
This fantastic bit of technical trickery was the foundational feature of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, but it’s worth reiterating what a singular spectacle Asobo has created. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 improves on the sightseeing simulation with way more detail, better performance and improved flying physics, and where the previous edition offered nothing much to actually do in the world besides gawp, the updated release features plenty to keep you busy. There are more challenges, more activities, a full suite of photography missions, and a career mode that’s somehow jankier than the ones I’ve seen in Stone Quarry Simulator, Garbage Truck Simulator, and The Guy Whose Job It Is To Separate Non-Recyclable Materials On The Conveyor Belt At The Recycling Centre Simulator.
Career mode has you working your way up from a wet-eared rookie pilot at an achingly realistic pace. Your first dozen jobs come from other pilots who’ve flown their plane somewhere and left it behind – whether for maintenance or because they partied too hard at one of those infamous pilot galas and had to get the train home – before you eventually graduate to skydiving missions and short passenger runs. Scrape together enough currency and you can take a stab at getting certification for more powerful and more interesting planes and helicopters, which unlock more specialisations and new mission types.
Focus your training on the helicopter skill tree and you’ll become certified in search and rescue operations and hoisting, the biggest and most dramatic departure from the classic flight simulator fare. These missions have you roving remote areas of the wilderness in search of injured hikers, or holding a steady hovering position 30ft above a sinking boat in stormy conditions as you pluck desperate sailors from the surging waves. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 now simulates rolling 3D waves rather than the flat surfaces of the previous edition, giving these ocean missions a nauseatingly realistic edge.
The actual hoisting is triggered by giving a command to your co-pilot with a button press, but the lowering of the rope and the added weight of your injured cargo dangling beneath your chopper all happens in real time and under flight physics, challenging you to keep your whirlybird steady for as long as it takes to pluck someone from the sea. Career missions like these tend to be tests of your foundational flying skills: steady hovering for helicopters, or flat and low-speed flight for dropping skydivers, or smooth and consistent turns near an Arc de Triomphe for sightseers. An extensive series of flight school training sessions equips you with the skills required for each mission type.
It’s slow-going and grindy, but for all its faults Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024’s career mode gives shape to the freeform blob of an otherwise aimless simulation. The game plants you in the cockpit of your starter plane, a Cessna 172, for so long that by the time you’re finally licensed to fly anything else – a field-hopping taildragger, or a plane big enough to mulch an entire flock of geese – you appreciate the differences in how they handle. Whereas previously I would bounce glibly between passenger jets and gliders like an indecisive Richard Branson, never sticking with any one plane long enough to get familiar with it, I’m now forced over dozens of flight hours to reckon with the quirks and foibles of each one.
The result is a simulation that feels immensely richer and more rewarding, at least for casual pilots like me, and all of it somehow in spite of incredible wonkiness. Launch issues plagued Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, with players facing endless loading screens, mid-flight disconnections and overheating Microsoft Azure servers reducing detailed vistas to muddy JPEG blobs.
Those bandwidth-related problems have largely sorted themselves out, but there are still plenty of more basic problems to contend with. My admittedly remote home airfield is home to an abstract mess of horrifying green obelisks jutting out of the earth like radioactive teeth, making take-off and landing impossible, while even more well-trodden spaces such as Manhattan are often spoiled by rivers melting into nearby structures and smearing ground textures up the sides of buildings.
Passenger dialogue is read aloud by what seems to be text-to-speech software from 1998, giving the constant chatter on missions a hauntingly flat and robotic tone. Sightseers will remark on the awe-inspiring majesty of flying over Knutsford with all the enthusiasm of a Roomba telling you it’s just finished cleaning the bathroom. On one flight, two passengers spoke of a birthday party they had been to at their grandmother’s house far below, their bleak delivery suggesting something truly unspeakable had happened there. Any concerns you might have about AI stealing our jobs will be edged out by unwelcome mental imagery of what grandma potentially did with a cake.
Then there are the even less entertaining bugs. Career mode and certain other activities let you skip time to the next interesting part of the flight, reducing eight hour long hauls to 20 minute jobs, but the transition will sometimes send your plane lurching into a stall or plant it deep underground. Helicopters are essentially off limits if you’re playing on an Xbox controller, the complexities of mapping everything to a couple of analogue sticks and buttons proving too much for even Asobo, who’ve otherwise done a remarkable job of cramming various control surfaces onto the pad’s limited inputs. And passengers will sometimes slide out of their seats and get wedged in the fuselage, which is bad news for them but somehow harmless to your reputation as a pilot.
But these issues are just uncommon enough that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 manages to weather them over and over again, and it’s never too long before the simulation begs your forgiveness with a relentless series of the most astonishing postcard views you’ve ever pointed your eyes at. Whether you’re breaking cloud cover over Mount Rainier, flying low over the gin-clear seas of Saint Lucia, or making your final descent into the greasy miasma of Gatwick, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is an endless parade of giddy spectacle.
ranzware
Add comment