Review: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a good sim, not a good game

How do you turn a good flight simulator into a good flight-simulation game?

This is the crux of understanding what’s new, interesting, and ultimately unwieldy about Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, the first entry in the decades-old series to actively court casual flyers and Xbox Game Pass-ersby. The series’ modern handlers at Asobo Studio aim for two extremes in this iteration: a realistic flight sim that lets aviation pros flip every switch on the overhead panel of an Airbus A310 airliner, and a gamepad-friendly, assists-filled game that teaches basic skills and allows the player to set a course to pretty-looking places.

Yet however I approach the game, I often find myself either frustrated, confused, or bored. Why fly these skies, I keep asking myself, with nary a clear answer — no overwhelming sense of visual awe, no core progression that feels respectful of my time, and a constantly reinforced fear that some random glitch might send me into a technical tailspin.

MSFS24 is, at its best, a competent, 8.5-out-of-10 facsimile of flight. It lets novices hold nothing but a gamepad and, through a constant hum of tooltips and assists, get a small biplane from takeoff to cruising to landing — all while feeling like a real-deal take on aerial handling. It lets players chart a flight from seemingly every patch of land and sea (yes, even through restricted airspace like Pyongyang’s). On a technical level, the sim runs chunkily but decently on Xbox Series X consoles, and better on high-end computers, as far as rendering fluffy clouds, foliage-lined landscapes, and (sometimes) recognizable cities. And if you want to take it up 10,000 notches on a PC, you can add an elaborate HOTAS rig, eye tracking hardware, VR headsets, and more.

The same can largely be said for the series’ relaunch as Microsoft Flight Simulator in 2020, which saw Asobo and Microsoft team up to combine the promise of full-Earth flight with a modern visual engine and a glut of Bing map data. Ahead of that launch, the devs had promised that its procedural terrain generation could make any location look believable enough to fly over, and while that was true at roughly 30,000 feet, closer scrutiny revealed a lot of missing visual detail: blurry cities, unconvincing landscapes, and ho-hum water.

This time around, things have improved enough to make MSFS24’s Earth look believable at closer to 10,000 feet, give or take. This is primarily thanks to improved conversion of the world’s foliage and forests; the team at Asobo is now parsing and rendering these with more diverse and believable geometry. But I’ve still found exceptions that baffle Asobo’s data-translation toolset, like this stretch of Mexican… lakes? Buildings? I’m not sure what these blotches below are supposed to be, but they would be right at home in an Ace Combat video game from the early 2000s:

Like in MSFS20, major cities and airports continue to rely on handcrafted renderings of famous buildings and landmarks, and thus far, assets like the Eiffel Tower, the New York City skyline, and Brazil’s Christ the Redeemer look like polygon-for-polygon matches for their MSFS20 equivalents. Sadly, the same can still be said for the lower-priority buildings that fill out most cities, which leads to many Insert Your Favorite City Here examples of unconvincing buildings and terrain across the planet.

In my case, my former hometown of Dallas, a busy international flight hub, only has one accurately rendered specialty building: its basketball and hockey arena, which is offset from the downtown skyline. Worse, its pair of fancypants Calatrava bridges continue to be rendered as generic roads over a river, with a weird dollop of white, flat concrete where their signature arches should otherwise appear. On a “visual flight rules” (VFR) basis, I’d prefer as a pilot to see an accurate bridge-to-river ratio than a squat sports arena.

The issue, really, is the uncanny valley that MSFS24 constantly flies into and out of. A jaw-dropping sunset bathes a billowing array of convincing clouds in postcard-worthy oranges and purples. Next to that, an island’s buildings look like poorly rendered Duplo blocks, and the water at its shore suffers from a mix of ugly wave effects and a bizarre, brightly lit seam separating its land and sea. And if you zoom the camera out in that moment, the plane you’re piloting might have flickering textures on all its sides for some reason, which distracts from the awe-inspiring, foliage-lined mountain behind it.

At a high cruising altitude, or when taking off and landing at any of the game’s handcrafted airports, MSFS24 neatly glides past some of these complaints. It looks and feels good enough for the sim flyer who wants to plug in their favorite HOTAS gear and role-play as a pilot for 20- or 80-minute flights. But flying on a more novice level, for the sheer thrill of realistic, beautiful scenery, is harder when the game looks this uneven.

For that player, MSFS24’s new selection of activities might seem like the perfect way to guide them toward carefully rendered corners of the planet and an ongoing sense of accomplishment. If only.

Video games often struggle with reproducing the entirety of a planet. In No Man’s Sky, plot, mission structure, base building, and other systems outshined the game’s quintillion pre-generated planets. Spore rhymed a little too easily with Snore, the way it asked players to manage its mostly lifeless worlds.

The best exception might be Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego? Famous places, historical places, funny places: Its devs staked out a map and dotted it with a script, puzzles, and life. MSFS24, then, is the opposite of Sandiego.

The game’s “activities” can be found in a top-level menu, yet they’re generally quite demanding. In some, you’re scored by how low to the ground you can fly without crashing; in others, you must land on tiny or difficult runways through severe weather patterns. There’s no prompting to take on the game’s hours of flight-training exercises before trying these challenges, but that training is absolutely necessary.

The easiest activity is a series of photography challenges, where you fly toward a famous, scenic vista, then pause the flight to pull out a camera and snap a particular type of photo. The very first photo challenge asks players to fly toward the pyramids, which seems like a great “only in video games” kind of thing to do, but then you see what the whole thing looks like — all of the poorly rendered buildings and splotchy textures — and wonder: Did anybody actually test this mode? Is this the first thing the devs wanted MSFS24’s players to see?

Thankfully, other photo challenges understand the assignment and look more handsome, though each has its own mix of pretty and unrealistic elements. After a while, the mix of difficult activities and simpler photo challenges run into a problem: What exactly are players accumulating? Photos come with objectives, and challenges come with leaderboards, but progress in either does nothing to advance the game or unlock new content.

On paper, MSFS24’s massive “career” mode is a more welcome addition to the series, as it asks players to progress from aspiring pilot to full-time businessperson. Train to learn basic flying skills, unlock certifications, take on exceedingly difficult missions, and eventually get into an economy of buying new aircraft and making serious cash. Search-and-rescue, firefighting, skydiver accommodation: MSFS has stuff for you to do this time around beyond taking off, cruising, and landing.

Only, it either doesn’t work or feels tragically soulless.

I mentioned Carmen Sandiego earlier because that series was careful about where it took players, and what kind of stories and dialogue they’d encounter. But MSFS24 is clearly eager to leverage Microsoft’s bullishness about AI: Why have an author write a script about a flight around a specific landmark, when Copilot can generate cringeworthy chatter about any random location someone might fly to or from?

Most of the game’s earliest missions involve ferrying AI-brained passengers from one place to the next, all while they read an AI-generated script using AI-generated voices. (Worse, these people appear in your plane with vacant, wide-eyed stares.) The soulless results consistently make me want to crash whatever plane I’m flying these robo-weirdos on.

Even when I successfully tuned their voices out, however, I still ran into too many issues. Since the missions are auto-generated across Earth — all starting in a hub zone of your choosing — they often place takeoffs and landings in weird places, sometimes with trees, buildings, or other debris in the path of success. Completing a mission at anything less than flying colors docks the amount of pay per mission, which slows down the earliest legs of the career to a brutal crawl, as you need cash to purchase access to new certifications. Plus, the criteria for performance can be quite opaque, if not at the bizarre whims of glitches. Maybe I take a shortcut and get full pay anyway; maybe I accept a mission’s offer to skip ahead in my flight, only to lose access to essential steps, like calling to the ATC tower, due to glitches that end up costing me big bucks.

In later missions, players are expected to buy their own planes — and any runway-related glitch that sends a plane tottering end over end will cost even more of the game’s precious credits, either in repairs or in the outright cost of replacing the plane. The same can be said for the portion of the career where players optionally hire AI pilots to take a fleet out to run moneymaking missions, only to face repair bills and other costs for whatever they did to the planes. Even if these issues can eventually be patched, I’m still baffled that the game has been out for weeks without the addition of an “easy” toggle to shift the economy into kinder territory.

All of this commentary is nowhere near the highest level of flight simulation scrutiny that avid flyers may seek. My 30 hours in MSFS24’s skies — full of low-level glitches, career economy setbacks, and a curious issue where my hot air balloons reverse-fired their heat in ways that would set a passenger on fire — did not put me in a position to fly at the highest levels. As but one example, only by watching a real-life pilot test the game on Twitch did I hear that MSFS24 might spend unrealistic amounts of time on deicing procedures.

Instead, my 30 hours in its skies confirmed that the game’s scattershot tutorials, middling career progression, barriers to higher-level missions, visual letdowns, and various glitches added up to the opposite of a positive, newbie-friendly flight school experience. Where there should be curation, there is AI. Where there should be splendor, there are flatly rendered bridges. (This says nothing of my issues with hooking up a HOTAS and having MSFS24’s in-game tutorials not tell me how to use their buttons; I had to print out a full-page guide just to sensibly understand how to use my Thrustmaster T.16000M bundle. My emailed questions to Microsoft’s PR team about this issue remain unanswered.)

If the Asobo team keeps up the same track record it had with MSFS20, I expect many of this game’s most egregious problems to get fixes — though I will never fully trust modern Microsoft as a steward of a series I love, lest I forget how quickly Halo Infinite became Halo finite. And if “more of the good stuff in MSFS20” is all you need to hear, these will ultimately be friendly skies for you. But only so much of MSFS24 can be patched with numerical value fudgings. Too much of the game’s core structure missed the mark, and too many users were already subjected to beta testing the servers and systems of a $60-and-up retail product. If you’re not already invested in the world of flying, don’t invest in MSFS24.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was released Nov. 19 on Windows PC and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC using a download code provided by Xbox Game Studios. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. You can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.