Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 review – a stunning achievement made even better

This probably isn’t what you want to hear from someone reviewing Flight Simulator 2024, but I spent my first three hours in-game gleefully running along the ground. From the air, this year’s iteration is even more breathtaking than its already astonishing 2020 predecessor; from the ground, though, it’s something else entirely. Touch down anywhere in the world, set out on foot, and the detail is extraordinary; cool winter light shines through dense forests of alpine trees on sheer snow-covered mountains; bleached rocks and parched flora pepper endless expanses of undulating desert sand; wind-blasted cliffside pathways wind through tawny thickets down to pebbled beaches and gently shimmering water – and provided you stay away from the lumpen photogrammetry of urban sprawls, it all looks so real. If Flight Simulator 2020’s holiday in a box potential already had you smitten, developer Asobo’s follow-up justifies its existence on its explorable landscapes alone.

And it does, perhaps, feel like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 needs to justify its existence more than most. Asobo’s 2020 effort was already a stunning achievement – a simulation so mind-bogglingly expansive in scope, so extraordinarily ambitious, it would require a truly revolutionary upgrade to feel genuinely essential. Unsurprisingly, Flight Simulator 2024 isn’t that sequel, instead favouring intelligent finessing and focused expansion over radical reinvention – but it’s still an impressive follow-up, building on its predecessor’s enthralling combination of open-ended simulation and more approachable curated challenges with purpose and precision.

That means its fundamental pleasures remain very much the same as before. Asobo’s 1:1 digital recreation of Earth – amassed and assembled through a clever confluence of real-world data – is still near unfathomable in its scope and realism, albeit now somehow even more dazzling, with its new cloud formations, improved weather effects, richly detailed terrain meshes, and, yes, that ground-level magic. It doesn’t feel particularly hyperbolic to call its 29,401 miles of simulated Earth the greatest digital world ever committed to a video game. It’s a thing of staggering beauty, endless freedom, and infinite opportunities. As you soar over its vast wilderness expanses and sprawling light-pricked metropolises, as you burst through lavishly rendered cloud layers and careen over iconic landmarks, it’s a world so remarkable its allure is obvious even if you’re not a traditional flight sim fan. And if you really want to wow yourself with how far 2024’s iteration has come, it’s got one hell of a party trick. Now, you can send the camera hurtling upward from your current position at any time, scenery shrinking until you’re hovering over Earth from outer space. Then just spin the globe and plunge seamlessly to a new destination, jagged peaks and rolling hills bursting into view as light shifts, seasons change, and flora and fauna spring into existence on-the-fly. It’s jaw-dropping.

Flight Simulator 2024’s victories go deeper than prettier visuals and more elaborate virtual tourism, though, and that starts with its brand-new Career mode. 2020’s attempts at approachability were admirable, its curated challenges and sightseeing modes offering compelling opportunities to appreciate the sim in a relatively controlled fashion. But it struggled, I think, to bridge the gap between its beginner friendly modes and its core simulation; to ease players like me – enthusiastic but undoubtedly at the more casual end of the spectrum – into a freeform sandbox that’s as daunting as it is alluring. 2024’s Career mode helps remedy that, though, bringing the sim’s disparate elements together to create a more coherent, foundational whole.

Career mode is also Flight Simulator at its most gamified, featuring procedurally generated missions, XP bars, post-mission ratings, progression tracks, and skill trees. That might sound horrifying to some sim purists, but for me, this more structured, measured approach has been a bit of a revelation. Essentially, Career mode is a game of classically moreish XP accruement and monetary acquisition, gradually taking players from humble work-for-hire beginnings to business ownership as they complete procedurally generated jobs and improve their skills. It’s surprisingly expansive in scope, too, supported by a huge number of engagingly varied mission types, ranging from straightforward half-hour passenger charters to more elaborate activities – crop-dusting, cargo deliveries, thrilling helicopter rescues, and so on – that, with their clearly defined beginning and ends, make Career mode far more conducive to shorter play sessions.

The clever bit, though, is the way all this unfolds. Unlocking new aircraft, mission types, and business features requires players to first earn specific licenses based on increasingly specialised flight disciplines, starting with airplanes and helicopters then branching out from there. Licenses, in turn, are locked behind lessons, examinations, and other pre-requisites designed to ensure you’re always up in the air, putting your newfound skills to the test. Essentially, it’s a virtual flight school, elegantly guiding players through the fundamentals and nuances of flight – everything from safe landings to successfully taking advantage of air currents – in a way that provides an invaluable foundation for the rest of the sim.

There are issues, admittedly. There’s not a lot of variety within each procedurally generated mission type, for instance, which can make the already somewhat glacial progress grind feel repetitive – and Career mode is also the area you’ll most often be subjected to Flight Simulator’s truly abominable AI-generated voices. Sure, I understand why Asobo might not want to pay voice actors to read aloud the name of every place on Earth to fit its contextual dialogue, but the AI alternatives it’s opted for – with their stilted, emotionless delivery and endless mispronunciations – are so bad, so immersion-shatteringly awful compared to the unquestionable beauty elsewhere, it ends up feeling a lot like Asobo shitting over its own Mona Lisa.

But presentational blemishes aside, Career mode is otherwise a real victory for the game. Its enjoyably familiar progression rhythms initially serve as a welcoming counterpoint to the intimidating vastness of the Free Flight sandbox, while slowly providing the groundwork for better understanding and more rewarding play elsewhere. And there’s a lot more to see and do besides. Flight Simulator 2024 is a phenomenally generous follow-up; outside of Career and Free Flight modes, Asobo has massively expanded its supporting range of self-contained excursions and challenges – smaller, more focused pockets of additional play – across hundreds of curated events. There’s rally racing, low altitude flying, landing challenges, and discovery flights – many featuring optional weekly leader boards for competitive sorts.

And that’s on top of the new World Photography mode, which builds ranked challenges around Flight Simulator’s excellent new camera tool. These require players to use their navigational know-how and aviation ingenuity while soaring through the skies, drifting serenely in hot air balloons, or sprinting around on foot to take different shots of looming mega structures, national parks, geoglyphs, European castles and even wildlife from specific angles. Sure, you could argue all this extra stuff is just flying with a different hat on, but these curated experiences, with their careful selection of stunning locales at their most seasonally striking, all bolstered by occasional bursts of stirring music, really do show off the sim at its most dazzling.

In terms of sheer ambition alone, Flight Simulator 2024’s scope is breathtaking. That Asobo has built out so confidently from its incredible 2020 offering to deliver something that feels even richer and more substantial is remarkable. And its significant under-the-hood enhancements are welcome too. Most notable, perhaps, is 2024’s new streaming technology, which (broadband speed allowing) radically reduces hard-drive space requirements compared to its predecessor, with hand-crafted landmarks, improved terrain data, and aircraft now streamed on-demand instead of demanding multi-gigabyte downloads. It does, admittedly, occasionally feels like the sim is straining under the weight of Asobo’s own ambitions – performance is erratic on PC, even allowing for Flight Simulator 2024’s increased system requirements, and its overhauled controller scheme is so digit-twistingly convoluted, even Salad Fingers would struggle. For the most part, though, this is a bold game delivered with real intelligence.

Unfortunately, some turbulence remains. To put it bluntly, Flight Simulator 2024’s launch was a disaster, and while Asobo has made significant strides in the weeks since, there’s still a lingering sense – and certainly not for the first time when it comes to Microsoft’s big first-party releases – Flight Simulator 2024 has been booted out the door a little too soon. In some cases, Asobo isn’t even trying to hide it; there are sections of Career mode’s progression tree, and notable activities in its challenge line-up, still marked with ‘coming soon’. Its in-game store also remains unavailable nearly three weeks after launch, meaning all previously purchased planes and forward-compatible DLC from the 2020 iteration continue to be unavailable.

There are other signs Asobo’s latest wasn’t quite ready for take-off, too. 2020’s beloved Bush Trips – wonderfully compelling guided tours across unusual landmarks – are completely absent, with only vague murmurs they’ll return at a later date. Then there are the frequent bugs; I’ve had flights where my chucks have become permanently welded to my wheels, making taxiing and take-off impossible; passengers moaning about being too high or going too fast, despite the onscreen UI claiming otherwise; landmarks regularly failing to load, and countless instances of controls suddenly refusing to work mid-flight, causing me to plummet inelegantly out of the sky. I can’t even imagine what things must be like for hardcore simmers with far more complex instrumentation to worry about. It feels like latency is still a significant problem, which is a little disconcerting given how reliant Flight Simulator now is on Microsoft’s servers.

Yet while these launch issues are undoubtedly frustrating, none of them feel insurmountable – especially given Asobo’s reassuring history of committed post-launch support, and the speed with which it’s already moved to address community concerns. And when Flight Simulator 2024 is working – which is considerably more often than not at this point – it really is incredible. It’s a follow-up of astonishing depth, breadth, and beauty that does enough, and does enough extremely well, I think, to justify its existence and then some, those intelligent additions and elegant refinements making for a far richer, more welcoming, and more foundationally engaging experience. Flight Simulator 2024 might not have its sights set on new horizons in the same way as its predecessor, and it never quite feels as essential as a result, but Asobo’s work – this gorgeous thing of endless freedom and infinite discovery – remains extraordinary.

A copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was provided for review by publisher Xbox Game Studios.