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.
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.
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.
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.
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