Sightseeing Simulator still hasn't found its legs
I really, really wanted this to be a positively enjoyable review to write. God, I wanted it.
I also wanted to be defiant in the face of negativity—this game is still recording a solid “Mixed” review state on Steam, and it always seems kind of easy to get lost in the plague of (justified, so far as I could tell) post-launch frustration. Maybe I should have still listened…
I put this purchase off while waiting for the bugs to get ironed out. I admittedly approached its oncoming release with a little bitterness, as I had counted on MSFS2020 to be something of a persistent game, receiving updates to that particular engine and giving us a long-lived, well-supported simulator into the late decade. I can’t recall if that was promised for the game, but regardless, it probably shouldn’t have surprised me for a company that infamously made the statement that Windows 10 would be their “last operating system”.
I saved the money and took the plunge on the $199.99USD “Aviator” package. The reason for this teetered on the double-edged sword promise that the insane installation and update cadence of MSFS2020 would be abandoned to offload significantly more of the simulator’s processing to the cloud. This of course again required a persistent internet connection. When the game was announced I was still running a DSL modem, so I questioned whether I could run this game despite my desktop’s aged but still respectable powerhouse specs. Which, for reference:
CPU: AMD Ryzen 7900X
RAM: 32GB DDR5-6000
SSD: PCIe 4.0 2x2 NVMe 2TB, 2GB DDR4 DRAM Cache
GPU: Reference model AMD Radeon 6950XT
Monitor: QD-OLED panel, 1440p resolution, 240Hz refresh rate
So understand that I was not approaching this with a slouch machine. In all honesty, the raw performance was well utilized. Thankfully I was “forced” into a 1Gbps cable connection over a Wi-Fi7 connection just before the end of last year, so I felt that any fears about saturating my circuit with streaming requirements would be alleviated by the time I dropped the cash on this purchase.
The game download from Steam was actually delightfully brief compared to the slog that was MSFS2024. This single side-by-side screenshot of the AppData folders should say it all:
This is entirely thanks to the revised server-side storage and streaming feature that was the catalyst of the disastrous first-day (First-week? First-month?) launch. One of the first things I looked up was whether or not there was some downplayed or undocumented feature that would allow for a full download for offline play, but the immediate consensus across the internet shot that down. As a Gran Turismo player as well, I quickly resigned myself to the fate of single-player experiences at the twilight of the first quarter of the 21st century. No love lost on this, honestly, and I greatly appreciate the space savings. Though my heart goes out to a world that still has not had the promise of broadband internet delivery fulfilled.
I cannot emphasize how frustrating the continuous updates for MSFS2020 are. A Steam commenter summed it up succinctly: “Most of my 47 hours on this game are downloading updates from Microsoft”. It made me feel somewhat vindicated as that’s my experience as well. It got bad enough, often enough that I simply would lose the desire to play the game by the time the download had finally completed. I can happily state that MSFS2024 makes ENORMOUS strides to alleviate this, and I have gladly opened and closed the game several times since download without having to suffer through that slog.
That said, first installation still asks for a fair amount of your time, and startup still takes a minute or two each time regardless of installation status. This also extends to in-engine loading. There are 10-second cutscenes in Career Mode that feel like they take an eternity to load as information is gathered and cached from game servers. As time went on, I went from impressed at the improvement to questioning whether some of that old loading time was simply distributed across the rest of the game.
But there were harbingers to come on that first boot. Before I even made it to the character creator screen I received a “safe mode” error that insisted that I start the game in a safe mode rather than normal; it’s the same error you get in MSFS2020 if the game crashes. I popped and eyebrow at this—it was just a button press to have the game start in normal mode, but it was not something I wanted to see with the multitude of reported issues firmly in the back of my mind. I then was forced to sign-in to my Microsoft Account.
I seem to recall this requirement being in MSFS2020 as well, though I don’t recall if it’s still a fairly recent requirement. But it’s another frustrating requirement in an age where I’ve already signed in to a dozen other services already.
The first boot loading screen that you will see every time you start the game is a cruel, gorgeous teaser for what’s to come. It’s simply a rehash of one of the pre-release trailers, but especially on a high-resolution OLED monitor, it’s still breathtaking to realize that this is in-game footage. And those images are fulfilled promises.
The first thing the game asks of you following graphics optimization is to create a character for Career Mode. The creator is limited in scope and the speech generator is unintentionally hilarious, as in this age of LLM’s the game still maintains a recognizable albeit updated version of the MSFS2020 “text-to-speech” generator for all spoken lines in the game. What gave me the heartiest chuckle was the customized default avatar.
The main menu is a variation on the MSFS2020 menu; something I appreciate since I praise product consistency. The first thing I did is went into options and upped the graphics to “ultra” wherever the option existed. I knew I wasn’t going to meet the PCMR-mandated 60FPS, but it’s a slow-paced flight sim at it’s core, and aiming for 30FPS was all I really needed. As I perused the options, I did note the statistics for current data consumption, hovering just over 116MB. I hadn’t even gone in-game yet. This was a very poignant demonstration of the bandwidth requirements that were about to rear their head.
My first inclination was to jump right into free flight. After a moderate loading time, I was greeted with the aircraft selection screen, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that my jaw dropped at how gorgeous the aircraft model looked.
Wow. I admit that I’m not too much of a gamer outside some niche interests, but I suspect this might be my first real experience with ray/path tracing outside of benchmarks, and man does it shine. I know that I said that the loading video was as promised, but it’s still somewhat incredible to see it pop like this.
I put myself on runway 35R at KAPA; my home turf. It was at that point I made that “wow” a vocalized one. Now I am not sure why this screenshot came out so badly saturated, and I’m not sure if it’s something the game is forcing to change, but try to imagine it without what seems like looking at it without a bad sun glare.
Now, understand that when I say KAPA is my home turf, I mean it. I have touch-and-go’d both 35R/L and 17R/L more times than I can recall in a Cessna 172, and this is the first time that MSFS managed to make me actually feel back on that asphalt. In some ways it was better since I wasn’t breathing in nauseous 100LL from the Lycoming as I sat for run-up.
The map data they promised REALLY pays off here. This is truly the first time that I feel that I could actually navigate by landmark. It simplified navigation so much, I realized that I could probably truly aviate for the first time in this franchise, if it wasn’t for the distraction of the sightseeing I was doing.
It was so effective that I successfully took off, pattern-ed, navigated towards the foothills, and came back to cleanly land all with just a keyboard, which is something I hadn’t really had any success with in the past. The whole time I was able to successfully navigate using familiar roads and landmarks, with the resolution and reflections so tight I could read the text of the Best Buy sign at the nearby mall. I really felt like I just needed to concentrate on my six-pack of instruments to successfully fly, and I didn’t need to put my eyes on the compass once. Although the QoL feature of providing in-game pointers to nearby airports in your field of vision helps you with your bearings quite a bit.
Upon shutting down the aircraft after a quick taxi to the tarmac, I used the free-roaming camera to continue my admiration of the scenery at the airport. As I maneuvered to the flight line, I noticed… an issue.
Why do I get a feeling something’s about to go wrong… But let’s be fair—MSFS2020, and heck, even previous incarnations of the simulator have had a similar issue present itself. Yes, perhaps it’s disappointing that we’re seeing upgraded generations of these types of glitches rear their ugly heads, but I’ll acknowledge the complexity of the engine as designed. We’ll move on for now.
After the quick flight, I took an inventory of the included aircraft as part of the Aviator package and was thrilled to see so many options, including my previously mentioned precious analog instrumented Cessna 172 and the late-and-great An-225. I took my time to simply admire some of the aircraft in the viewer, to continue to take in these graphics.
I actually have praise for this; the MSFS flight model has sort of pinnacled for what’s available, and really you need just maintain it and improve the graphics fidelity going forward. Normally I might be more critical about a lack of improvements to the model, but in this case, particularly with how casual a flyer I am, I don’t think it needs to be a priority.
But it was at this point I wanted to jump into what Asobo/Microsoft really wanted to emphasize with this release: Career Mode.
It was at this point reality came crashing down.
Remember those loading times that I told you about; man what a slog that started to become here. After picking an airport of my choice to start my journey with; in this case a small airstrip in Everitt, Colorado (which until now I had thought was a private airfield), the load times just to get to a 15-second cutscene made me wonder what the heck was coming through from those servers and whether I was being throttled by the far side. It’s somewhat interesting to realize that the mode is working with dynamic data and it’s rather impressive that it can pull off the ability to run the first mission from an airfield and area of your choice, but that impatience started to kick in.
After meeting Mr. Whalen here, I took off for my first flight, which was actually a simple tutorial that oddly pressured me to skip my otherwise fairly accurate preflight walkaround for my G1000 Skyhawk. Additionally, strangely enough my instructor gave me orders to start the plane from cold, but didn’t offer guidance on how to do so. Thankfully the 172 is simple to start up; masters on, set mixture to full, turn the key, and pull mixture back, but for what is clearly presented as a mandatory in-game-disguised tutorial, it felt incomplete.
It’s possible that this is because I set the game’s physics/difficulty to “realistic”, but I don’t think that should have affected a very real need for instrument guidance. After flying through virtual boxes and struggling to make it to 7800 feet, the tutorial ends and the game presents you with a decision tree/mission progression menu for the continuance of your new career, demonstrating the options for where you might be able to take your interests.
I then subsequently selected the option to start mission two and… crash to desktop.
Oh no.
I immediately started the game up again, and forced my way through the myriad of loading screens again. I went back to career mode where it thankfully saved my progress, and I managed to make it into the second mission without incident this time, but the issues were starting to stack.
I then went back to free flight to play around with the DA62, one of my favorite GA aircraft and this time connected my Thrustmaster T.1600 so I could have a more engaging flight experience. I’d like to revisit that screenshot over the wing of the DA62 I put above.
You see this? You know what happened right after I took this screenshot? Yep, game crash. My frustration was peaking. I again navigated to launch the game and noticed my time played and got significantly more irritated.
I know that I hadn’t spent that much time in the air. Easily half or more of that was spent in loading screens or option tuning. Perhaps I’m asking too much, but the veneer of alleviated loading times was starting to crack. I was getting flashbacks.
I had to know if my experience was unique, so I spoke with a friend who had purchased the game on day one. He’s currently enjoying an around-the-world free flight that he’s been on and off with for several weeks now, but his statements about career mode hit hard. He experienced much the same, and he stated that Career Mode remains in a broken state, and he has completely given up on it.
And honestly, so have I. What a disappointment. I know that engaging mission-centric gameplay is something that this franchise desperately needs to expand it’s demographic. I’ve had more than one conversation about MSFS with our own Aaron Mendoza here where he has stated that he prefers the customization and objective driven gameplay of DCS, and it has steered him away from MSFS as the franchise has matured. It is so critical that this feature stabilizes and is completed. But the experience of system instability in such a limited time within free flight is so damning. It’s like trying to play a Windows game in the 90’s again—that’s not a good thing, especially when combined with the added 21st-century Sword of Damocles that is high-bandwidth, online-only requirements.
I can’t play this game right now. It’s been multiple months after launch and the “mixed” reviews remain accurate. It’s not worth pulling out and routing the cables for my Saitek yoke, throttles, and rudder pedals for this. In fact, I’m considering a refund. I swear I’m not trying to be petty, but in less than 90 minutes, having this kind of instability just can’t be excusable in a game that is designated a version 1.x.
It’s so gorgeous, it’s so tempting, but the initial loading video infuriates me in the same way that the update loop of MSFS2020 did. It teases me into what I could be experiencing but delivers such a sub-par experience that I want to just walk away. I can’t even complete a 30-minute flight without a crash, which defeats so much of the purpose of what I’m willing to acknowledge is a glorified sightseeing tour in many respects.
Now is not the time. But after this long, I don’t know when the time will be. Don’t waste your money on the Aviator version of this game. Don’t bother with the Deluxe version. In fact, just don’t. Don’t put up with the frustrations for should be a semi-professional flight training tool.
I guess we’ll see if a revisit in 2026 makes a difference.
Writer
T.J. "Millie" Archer is Life-long realist and aviation enthusiast. Once the co-founding Administrator of the Electrosphere.info English Ace Combat Database. In the present day he is freelance, roving the internet in search of the latest aviation news and entertainment. [Read Profile]
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