Format: Windows 10
Genre: Flight Simulation
Developer: Asobo Studio
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios

From the frozen wastes of the Antarctic to the blistering sand dunes at Giza to the rolling tropical hillscapes of Bolivia, the entire planet is re-created, rushing gigabytes' worth of data to players en masse and in real-time as they zoom over the landscape. Real-time reconstructed, three-dimension vistas are composited as if by magic, sourced from Bing Maps and Azure sorcery. Clouds swirl and organically form from air pressure and water vapor, just as they do in real life. The plane exteriors look marvellous, but it's the aircraft interiors, with their realistically-textured woods and metals and leathers, which really steal the show, as they reflect even the in-flight instruments off of their shiny window surfaces.

The game's opening theme is a light, almost Jazz-fusion esque synth melody-- relaxing and exciting, at the same time. And that's about all the music there is in this new Flight Simulator, other than a short motif which plays as missions begin. Rather, it's the acoustics of actual flight which take center stage: the game simulates sound so accurately, that the propeller tone shifts as the external camera is swung around the aircraft. Environmental sounds like rain, lightning, and wind are a bit too flat-- but the dynamically-created, full-on speech synthesis air traffic control interactions are spookily life-like, almost startlingly so.

In the 80's and 90's, flight sims were both deep and accessible, all at once: they had hundreds of bindable shortcuts, but could also be enjoyed with simply a joystick or Gravis Gamepad and just a few keyboard keys. Unlike other modern flying games, which are either boringly arcade-oriented or absurdly incomprehensible to non-pilots, this new Flight Simulator takes this reviewer back to all-time classics such as "Aces of the Pacific": splitting the difference-- as simple or as complicated as the player wants the game to be.

Every gust of wind real-time simulated off aircraft surfaces; a fully-modelled weather system; real-world air traffic, where the player can follow an actual plane in-game, and simultaneously hear it going over his house in real life; thirty seven thousand airports, and every single city and town on the face of the globe; a generous selection of interesting aircraft, from airliners to a stunt biplane. This new Flight Simulator is the most ambitious piece of software written in the past twenty five years-- and it has the chops to back up its ambition with execution. The long-blurring line between reality and game just got smudged.