Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Review (Hengist)
I'd like to preface this by saying that I am a pilot myself, and while I don't know everything, I can speak to a few aspects of the simulator.
Firstly, there are many positive aspects to the sim. The world is recreated in amazing detail, the overall game is gorgeous, and while the airplane flight feel isn't as good as X-Plane, the aircraft are lovingly and even lavishly recreated. MSFS 2024 can legitimately be used as a training tool for a number of aircraft systems at this point.
Unfortunately, that is where my compliments must end. Despite being in the United States and using a 150 Mbps connection, the game constantly tells me my connection is too slow. I have traced the problem to MSFS`s content delivery network, which despite having had weeks to improve, is only pushing data to me at about 7 Mbps. That is the best that can be done with a VPN to several major server farms. Without the VPN, I'm lucky to get more than 4 Mbps. Loading and transitioning is agonizingly slow, prone to crashing, and often loads textures and models so blurred they would fit better into Flight Simulator 98 than anything modern. And yes, this often includes the cockpits! You can start a flight with a modern cockpit, look at some nicely rendered scenery in exterior view, and then return to cockpit view and time travel to 1998 graphics. There is no guarantee the rendering will fix itself, BTW.
And that extends to Career Mode as well, which can charitably called unfair. Sometimes you will get dinged for taxi-overspeeding for crawling along at 2 kts. A gust of wind causes your 172 to hit 86 kts, and immediately you get dinged for flap overspeed. The sim perpetually proposes nonsensical flight routes, and the ATC simulation sometimes croaks without allowing any of the inputs to continue dialog. The game teleports the taxi route you are following right before your eyes and then immediately spanks you for being outside of the expected taxi area. The game will happily arrange your fixed wing flights to include "runways" that would make a helicopter nervous. It will also occasionally spawn invisible walls, or trees in your taxi route, or cars fixed into the middle of runways. More than once it has even spawned my airplane UPSIDE DOWN, and then a second later told me that I crashed the airplane.
Here's a PRO-TIP: If the sim screws you like that, especially if you fly with basic insurance (because you know what you are doing) and don't want to suffer career-mode ending BS, DO NOT click Next when the sim tells you that YOU are the problem. Instead, CTRL-ALT-DEL and End Task the m'fer. It won't save the screw up if you're fast.
In conclusion, this sim is more likely to frustrate than to please most players. Die-hard simmers and pilots might put up with the BS for practical reasons, but there's no excuse for the sorry state of the sim almost 2 months after release. I find very few of these glitches to be things that would have slipped by even perfunctory beta testing, so I think it's safe to assume at this point that Asobo and MS will release a few more tweaks to appease the loudest voices and biggest bugs, and then leave everything as buggy as it is. They did the same thing in MSFS 2020.
As I'm almost at the end of my ATP pilot licensing, I think I can confidently say this will be the last MSFS installment I purchase. Hope this review was helpful to someone.
EDIT: @MightBeAnNPC pointed out that I accidentally said MBPS instead of Mbps. Corrected that. That typo unfortunately changes nothing in my review.
I would like to specifically point out that the Jan 9th patch that recently dropped was a complete joke and solved a minor issue very few people were having. The release notes for the January 9th update reveal that the Flight Sim team IS FOCUSED ON OPENING THE SIM MARKETPLACE over getting the game fixed. What a total joke - a sim as broken as this should prioritize ACTUALLY WORKING over any Marketplace BS! As if the launch wasn't bad enough, that reveals a complete focus on squeezing Flightsim players for money instead of delivering anything resembling a finished or quality product.
If you purchase this game at this point, all I can say is that you have been warned.