I don't think there's much to say about this title. It is hands down the Best Flight Simulator till date. This is coming from someone who's been into flight simulators since the 2000s. Nothing comes close to this in terms of the game engine, audio, graphics and online capabilities.

If you know what you're doing and have a passion for aviation, you already know all of that. For the average gamer, I can still guarantee you're going to have a blast flying in this game.


The scenery is absolutely breathtaking and the weather effects are beautiful. The clouds honestly look so real. The cities are modelled to uncanny accuracy and the handcrafted airports are very well detailed. It's an amazing experience flying in the in-game world.


Perhaps the most important part of a flight simulator, the Airplanes. Now, I'll be honest here, the default airplanes are alright. The airliners are fine, but the General Aviation airplanes just feel way too twitchy even with a good joystick with low sensitivity.

As for the flight model, as these are default airplanes, you can't expect 1:1 realism like a study level airplane but the airliners are very good for the most part except when coming into final approach. I still have no idea why Asobo Studios haven't fixed the wing dip issue yet on the stock A320 and it almost ruins all my landings. The yoke and rudder inputs are also more sensitive than I would like even on the airliners but they are manageable.

Most of the essential buttons work in the cockpit, but some functions are still inoperable especially in the airliners. This isn't a huge issue as hardcore sim enthusiasts are anyway going to opt for payware airplanes.

I would say the default aircrafts are more than good enough even for enthusiasts. They are a massive step up from what we used to have previously but if you're expecting them to be as accurate as the real world counterparts, then you'll be disappointed.

I would like to give a huge shout out to FlyByWire here on their A32NX freeware mod. It's absolutely amazing and it's quite close to a study level A320 like the Aerosoft which I have flown previously. It fixes basically all the gripes I have with the stock A320. Anyone getting this sim who wants a good A320 mod, then look no further.


• Let's get the main thing out of the way. The Downloading Experience is absolutely Horrible. . It took me more than 26 hours. Yes, 26 hours to download the game. I have a connection of 200 Mbps but I only got around 1-2 megabit/s download speed on the servers. I really think Microsoft has to address this as this is in my opinion the biggest flaw this game has. I can't imagine how it would be like for people with slower internet connections.

• The flight model on the default airplanes, as mentioned previously is not the best, but it's good enough. (Not really a negative, just something to keep in mind)

• The system requirements - This is not a game for low or mid range hardware. I have a Ryzen 5 3500X and RTX 2060 and I get around 60 FPS on high-ultra settings depending upon the cloud density, traffic and time of day. Note that this is with no significant mods except for the FBW A32NX. This figure will go down if you use resource intensive mods. You need both a very capable CPU and GPU to run this game.


If you love flight simulators as much as I do, then this is a no brainer. Yes, it's not quite up to where P3D or X-Plane is currently in terms of flight dynamics, but with PMDG and Aerosoft coming out with study level airplanes soon, this will be the undisputed king of flight simulators.

For regular folks, this is an amazing way to decompress after a long day of work. The world is modeled beautifully and it's almost impossible to get a bad screenshot in this game.

Gone are the days when you had to purchase hundreds of dollars of mods in order to get a good experience.

I think it's well worth the price tag for the regular edition. I do not have the deluxe version of the game so I cannot comment on that.

TL;DR - Amazing scenery and good default airplanes. Needs a high-end PC to run and downloading the game is a nightmare. Overall, once you get it up and running, there's no complaints for the most part.