Why Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is a hidden gem in the PC Game Pass library

As open worlds go, it doesn’t get much better than a 1:1 scale replica of actual planet Earth. Slap on a flight model good enough to get the nod from serious aviators, and heartstopping visuals that remind you why you’re still paying off that GPU, and you’ve got Flight Simulator 2024 - the best flight sim around, and it’s available on PC Game Pass.

Flight sims used to be tedious things, once upon a time, all squinting at 2D altimeters and peering down at 256x256 textures of some grass. Then Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 arrived with showstopping graphics and some clever streaming tech which - let’s not even pretend we’re going to try to understand - but the end result is the whole world, rendered via Bing Maps data pulled in dynamically via the cloud and some smart procedural elements to populate 3D objects like buildings and foliage.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 builds on that strong foundation with even more impressive assets in numerous categories, so we’d better start going through them.

The world

Before we even get into the massive career mode, all the challenges, races and planes packed into this flight sim, we’ve got to talk about the main character: planet Earth.

When you enter the free flight screen, you’re greeted by an enormous globe full of little dots. You zoom in a bit and you see more dots. Then you realise every dot is an airport, and that you can fly from any of them, to any of them, across the world, and when you look down along the way you’ll see a pretty accurate recreation of how Earth actually looks in the real world.

The world map is equally good at massive urban sprawls like New York, Paris and Tokyo or natural wonders, rolling fields, dramatic hills, desert plains and mountain ranges. Flying around and just taking all these views in is a big part of the enjoyment in Flight Sim 2024, which is why developer Asobo very thoughtfully added a photo mode this time.

The career

The sheer depth of exploration on offer makes this a great aviation sandbox, but thanks to a newly introduced career mode, there’s a huge variety of different structured experiences to get your yoke around, and a sense of overall progression that really helps with the sense that you’re honing your skills as a pilot.

You pick a ‘home’ airport, take a quick look around your suspiciously tidy office, then choose from a number of career paths, like obtaining your commercial pilot license, helicopter specialisation, and ratings in different plane types like heavy airliners.

You’ll also see missions pop up dynamically on the world map. The poor denizens down below are always getting themselves into the kind of scrapes that need an aviator’s help, and it’s up to you to get involved in everything from aerial firefighting and medevacs to hot air balloon rides and crop-spraying.

The planes

There are 70 aircraft available in the standard edition of Flight Sim 2024, all with their own cockpit layouts to acquaint with, their own unique instrument displays, pre-flight checklists, in-air behaviours and - most crucially - cool liveries to snap in photo mode.

It’s the variety here that really stands out - everything from small prop planes to helicopters to commercial jets you’ve likely boarded many times yourself, like the Airbus A300 and Boeing 737 Max 8. Now that you can get out of the plane and walk around to inspect it on the ground, somehow your chosen aircraft just feels more yours, and you can appreciate the details up close. The spectacular scenery gets all the headlines when it comes to this game’s visuals, but let it be noted that, well, the aircraft scrub up pretty well too, don’t they?

Flight Simulator 2024 Standard Edition is available right now on PC Game Pass, so if you haven’t taken to the skies yet, consider this your virtual boarding pass. See you up there.