In fact, it feels like there are two games in here, although both are so loosely defined that “game” feels like the wrong word for them. It’s an infinite real-time sightseeing tour hidden between crunchy layers of super-realistic flight sim. You can charter a random flight path from one of several dozen major airports, ignore your intended destination, and go check out the country or city of your choice.

It’s the sort of thing you’d pull out to show people why you have a Series X at all. You can fly above a savannah and see individual trees, or pick out single cars in traffic on a highway 2,000 feet below you. It’s a graphics showcase on par with a Forza game, which displays elegantly rendered real-time versions of the world via Microsoft’s cloud servers. It’s easy to see why Flight Simulator is on the Xbox, though. A lot of compromises have been made here to make Flight Simulator a console game, and while it works, everything but actually flying a plane is a rough experience.

Now you’re asked to set up a hundred different keyboard shortcuts without a keyboard, and stuck using a virtual mouse cursor to navigate your cockpit and toolbar. More importantly, Flight Simulator 2020 was already notorious for being a difficult-to-navigate stack of nested menus, and being crammed into a console has not made the experience any more user-friendly. There was an incident with a snow-covered runway in Wyoming. (It’s very easy with the default settings to pull the yoke too hard, which has gotten me in some trouble when I’ve tried to land. The part of the game where you’re actually flying a plane is comfortable and reasonably intuitive on a gamepad, although you’ll want to dial back the sensitivity on the thumbsticks. Xbox One users can’t install it at all, though Microsoft promises they’ll get cloud access to Flight Simulator at some point in the future.Īs a console port, Flight Simulator struck me as a mixed bag. It’s worth noting that at time of writing, Flight Simulator is only available for the Series X|S.

Alternatively, it will go live on the Xbox Game Pass at launch. $59.99 gets you the default experience, with 20 planes to fly into and out of 30 airports the $89.99 deluxe edition adds five more planes and airports.

The Xbox version of the game is the first time that Microsoft has ever ported any version of Flight Simulator to a console.

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