Microsoft Flight Review

I’ve always loved simulation games; you can take on the role of whatever you want for as long as you like without needing silly qualifications to do so. Because of this, I was very happy to see that Microsoft had released a new flight simulator and to further that excitement, it was free to play!

Microsoft Flight is the successor to the ever popular and yet discontinued, Microsoft Flight Simulator, based in Hawaii. I have many a fond memory of sitting down my grandad to (try and) play these flight simulators. The problem was, as a child (and a teen, as well as a young adult), I didn’t have the best reflexes or concentration. This, matched with my incapability to understand the phrase “slight movements”, meant that I could never really play them for too long without getting frustrated. Luckily, Microsoft Flight seems to have gotten the balance just right for me!

The thing that frustrated me the most about the series was that the games weren’t necessarily based around the flying experience, rather on keeping control of an aircraft in the air - in other words, they were too realistic for my liking. I know, some of you are currently thinking “What part of simulator did you not understand you cretin!” and I agree, I should have expected it. However, I did not. All I wanted to do was fly some planes with my grandpappy but alas, I was stuck on the ground flicking switches and unable to move off the runway. Upon launching Microsoft Flight however, I was in the air within thirty seconds!

Don’t get me wrong, there are still buttons to press and switches to flick for those of you that like to do that sort of thing (I’m not here to judge you) but for those of us who just want to fly some motherflipping planes in the motherflipping sky, we can do so. As far as controls go, they are pretty simplistic. You can use either keyboard and mouse or joypad/stick (or a combination of the two) to master the skies and the tutorial you partake in at the beginning (this is optional but advised) will explain everything from the basics of flying to landing.

The gameplay itself isn’t great though. I mean, it’s fun, sure but the base game only comes with two planes and just under a dozen airports. These airports each have jobs that you can complete for experience but each only has about two or three jobs that you can partake in with the standard planes. For the other jobs, 4 more planes and to be able to fly on the other islands of Hawaii you must purchase the DLC for the game. This means that I was flying a lot of hungry people to a lot of distant $100 burger bars (the first job from every airport) and then taking a couple of tourists to see some sights. What I’m trying to say is that it does get quite repetitive. You can also do challenges to gain experience which involve flying through rings, collecting stars and landing in increasingly more difficult environments.

The good thing about the gameplay though is that you don’t have to do everything. For instance, in the tourists flights, the sites you are visiting can be 30 nautical miles (NM) away and if I’m flying at 90 knots, I’m not getting there anytime soon (takes about 20 minutes). This means I can either sit there, keeping my plane steady for this time or I can press a button and skip it, spawning about 3NM away from the checkpoint. This does speed the process up but also loses you experience points. If you choose to sit through this, you are rewarded with about 500 experience points - not worth it really in my opinion. The only issue I had with skipping it was that it started to feel more like a taking-off-and-landing simulator rather than a flight simulator.

Microsoft Flight also has a multiplayer function so you can meet up with your friends (or if you’re like me and have no friends, strangers on the internet) and fly planes together. I spent a few hours flying around with a few russian fellas which was quite fun and the voice chat sounds like a headset if you were in an airplane (although a tad quiet and no ability to raise the volume). The only letdown in the multiplayer aspect was the inability to get into anybody else’s planes. You can view their planes from the main menu and watch them fly but you can’t physically ride shotgun which was a slight letdown for me.

There has always been a common pattern with the Microsoft Flight series and that is: The planes tend to look fantastic (for their time) and the weather is pretty realistic but the scenery is poor. This rings true in Microsoft Flight. The planes are incredibly detailed (and you can look at these in even more detail if you park up and exit your plane!) and look amazing and the weather (implementing the new weather engine in Microsoft Flight) looks great but the scenery itself is, for lack of a better word, pants. This is one of the reasons that I chose to skip the 20 minute flights most of the time because there is nothing to look at in awe and amazement other than the planes themselves. Quite a disappointment.

Speaking of planes, you probably want to know a bit about what you can get your hands on! Well, as I mentioned earlier, you are supplied with two planes in the base game; these are the Boeing PT-17 Stearman (Deluxe) (the iconic Stearman from WWII which are now used as crop dusters and in airshows) and the Icon A5 (Deluxe) (A light sports aircraft which can land on water). Both fly slightly differently but the biggest difference I could see, not being a connoisseur of aviation, was the controls are slightly different (as in, you can control the fuel mixture in the Stearman and you can lift the landing gear up in the Icon A5). Not a huge difference between them but both, to a simpleton like me, are fun to fly!

Microsoft Flight is a free-to-play and fun flight simulator that you can grab a few friends and fly around with but the scenery was a real letdown for me and detracted from the whole experience. Overall, I’d definitely say that if you’ve not tried your hand at flight simulators before, to give it a go. What’s the worst that can happen? It is free after all! And for those of you who are slightly more mastered in the art, I think that there is some fun to be had here but it may not be quite as authentic as you are use to.