Back in 2020, I had a legitimately fun time playing the first Microsoft Flight Simulator to be released on consoles, even though I’m not a big fan of these kinds of simulators. It was one of the surprise hits of the year, a brief glimpse of joy and escapism during the pandemic period. With that being said, that game was a bit shallow in terms of content. Sure, you could explore the whole world, but it had no career mode, and its base roster of planes was shallow. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 sought to remedy these issues by offering players the most complete flight simulation experience outside of actually flying a plane. And sadly, it flopped. It’s a major disappointment. Let me explain.

This game can be pretty when the servers decide to side with you.

I don’t know exactly what happened behind the scenes, because in theory, Flight Simulator 2024 should have been magnificent. In terms of content, it IS magnificent. There is a brand new career mode to give this whole game purpose outside of the small circle of flight and aircraft enthusiasts. The amount of vehicles you can pilot has also been vastly expanded, as you’re able to command anything from a hot air balloon to a fighter jet, as well as the Wright Brothers’ experimental model.

I really have no idea what happened. Was it due to Microsoft’s insistence on having the game basically run on cloud-based features? If that is case, the actual owners of the Azure cloud service have failed miserably. Flight Simulator 2024 takes ages to load, even on a 500Mbps connection, and that also results in many framerate hiccups and assets and textures taking long to be properly presented onscreen. Any semblance of immersiveness is thrown out of the window, just like a Boeing 737 MAX’s actual window.

Once you reach cruising altitude, that means the big fat glitches are mostly over… until you’re required to land.

But server issues aren’t the only issues I’ve seen in the game. To be fair, if a crappy performance was the only issue, I would have still been able to properly enjoy this game. It would have turned some sections into a hassle, sure, but things would become smooth once up in the air. But for reasons I cannot comprehend, the overall gameplay felt disastrous.

The input responsiveness acted randomly. At times, a plane simply wouldn’t respond to my commands. At first, I thought it was just some kind of in-game hindrance from a specific model, to showcase it’s supposed to be hard to handle. But nope; upon going to a less crowded area of the globe, controls would work. At times, I’d try to deploy my landing gear, and the Windows virtual keyboard would pop-up. I’d also try to steer the plane with the left analog stick, and the CAMERA would move instead. After a while, I just stopped trying and gave up. I booted Age of Mythology up instead.

If you really want to pilot a fighter jet, just play Ace Combat instead.

I imagine this can still be salvaged with a handful of desperately needed updates. When Asobo finishes fixing this game, then Flight Simulator 2024 might actually end up being worth your time. The potential is there, you can clearly see it. As it stands, however, I really don’t care it’s pretty, that it has more content, or a fully-fledged career mode; it’s simply too glitchy and unpolished for me to bother. Ironically enough, it’s basically the real-life Boeing debacle, but if the 737 MAX was a video game.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is available now on Xbox Series S/x and PC.

Reviewed on Intel i7-12700H, 16GB RAM, RTX 3060 6GB.