Format: Windows 11
Genre: Flight Simulation
Developer: Asobo Studio
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios

Everything said about the 2020 release in this reviewer's take is doubly true in its 2024 sequel: vibrant greens, golden deserts, and snow-capped mountains contrast against bright blue skies and their fully-dynamic clouds like never before. Light reflects off of aircraft paint to an even more realistic degree, and the interiors boggle the mind. The user interface has been totally revamped, starting with a cool looking tablet mechanic known as the "Electronic Flight Bag", or "EFB", and the fresh coat of polish really helps things to feel fresh again. Performance is very good, with full support for DLSS and frame generation.

Consulting company "Finishing Move" was retained from this title's predecessor to once again provide the music. While the theme song isn't as memorable as the 2020 title's was, it still provides a little aural thematic cohesion to the package. Just as in the previous game, the engine sounds are fabulous and emulate the Doppler Effect among many other noise-related phenomena. The speech synthesis is back, and in the career mode the intonations are often wrong to hilarious effect: "It will be fun to fly with you CAPTAIN." Just like with the previous game, the audio overall is solid but not as impressive as the package's other aspects.

Flight Simulator 2024 has everything from the previous game: the whole globe can be flown, there are a zillion selectable aircraft, and so forth-- it's absolutely brilliant. But added to that is a brand new career mode, which involves doing short trainings, followed by license exams, followed by grinding missions for cash. The missions range anywhere from taking people up for sight seeing to putting out forest fires-- although this reviewer has not progressed that far yet, because the cash amounts given per mission is quite low in the beginning. Helicopters take a more central role in this title with a whole portion of the career tree devoted to them-- and they fly almost too realistically!

This new Microsoft Flight Simulator is the entire 2020 experience, but with an addicting career mode added to the mix. This reviewer is playing the game just after launch, and there have been some technical issues: the dynamic nature of the campaign means mission objectives can sometimes be fussy, or not trigger, or the player's plane can spawn inside of a building-- and the game is even more dependent on servers than the prior one, trading a smaller initial install size for high bandwidth usage while playing. All of that said, from hot air balloons to fighter jets to hang gliders to helicopters, there is an almost infinite amount of things to do and places to visit in this incredible release.