I don’t often do scenery reviews but in 2026 I think I will aim to put together at least a few. For my first scenery review of this year, I’m focusing in on the re-released Okavango Delta by SimWorks Studios. Let’s have a look!

Disclaimer

SimWorks Studios set me up with free access to the updated Okavango Delta so I could have a look at it. No expectations of a review, however, I always like to try and show off content so people can make purchasing decisions so I’m reviewing it anyways! SimWorks Studios did not exercise any editorial direction over this project.

Content overview

One of the reasons why this scenery pack is so interesting is that it’s not a scenery pack that does one airport at detail nor is it a region or city pack but something in between.

The scenery covers the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana. It’s the largest inland delta in the world and the home to lush varities of animal and plant life. Roads in this region are few and so the vehicle of choice, to get around the area, is the airplane!

SimWorks Studios have put this scenery pack together with custom wetlands, 12,000 animals spread out around the area, and twenty-nine custom airstrips all over the region. There’s also dozens of helipads located at the airstrips and in their own locations too. Six of the camps have very highly detailed interior areas, there’s a custom Cessna 208 Safari Wings livery, and there are two bush trips for MSFS 2020 users.

Here’s a map provided by SimWorks Studios showing what is on offer.

Back from the dead

I nearly bought Okavango Delta a few years back. A wide area, covered in scenery, and ideally suited to small plane action? Seemed like the perfect area to go exploring in! But then SimWorks Studios pulled the scenery package from their store. What happened?

The scenery add-on initially worked well enough. Then, everything changed when MSFS 2020 Sim Update 5 came along. The scenery would, once installed, cause excessively long load times with it sometimes taking 20 or 30 minutes to load the sim. That wasn’t a workable situation obviously and despite efforts to fix it, SWS ultimately pulled it from sale until they could find a fix. And find a fix they have!

The scenery is now back and its been rebuilt and made ready to work in MSFS 2020 and 2024.

How is it?

I’ve spent some time flying around this region using a couple of different aircraft and flying different service patterns visiting various airports and camps.

This is the kind of scenery that is best taken in at very low altitudes. All of the details are down there and, with MSFS 2024, the experience is even better thanks to the new 3D trees and ground details. Combine that with the animals that have been added to the region and everything feels just a little bit alive. That’s what you want with this kind of experience.

The thing that’s impressed me is the scale and scope. Yes, the scenery is €22.99, however, with 29 airports spread out over a significant area you’ll find that you can go from the northernmost airport to the southernmost airport in about an hour in the slower GA-8 AirVan or DHC-2 Beaver and a bit faster with the PC-6, Cessna 208 or Kodiak 100. And of course there’s lots of sightseeing and crisscrossing of the area that you can do too. The camp airports are mostly long and wide enough that you can easily accommodate a type like the Cessna 208 or PC-12.

Your aircraft choices are pretty open here with conventional GA types as well as bushplanes feeling very much at home here. There isn’t a lot of rough fields so you don’t need the bushplane setup, however, they do fit well with low altitude sightseeing and being on the search for the animals placed around the region. So anything from SWS’s Zenith CH701 to Got Friend’s A-32 Vixxen seems like a good choice for those low and slow experiences. Or hop in something faster and run a mini commuter service across the wider region. There’s good versatility!

Airport scenery comes in a couple of varieties. These are all austere back country dirt strips, however, many of them are 6,000 feet long so they have good length. Others are a bit shorter and there are some helipads kicking around too. Unlike some of the payware or freeware bushplane specific scenery, these aren’t epic clifftop approaches or short airstrips needing tight last minute turns, these are wide open spaces that make for easier approaches. It’s consistent with the area.

The scenery elements at many of these tend to be a few fuel barrels, a shelter, some parked vehicles (mostly off road vehicles and jeeps), and some animated people. Sometimes there are other details but that covers the kind of basic default experience.

There is quite a bit of repetition but there are some unique configurations as well. The Okavango airstrip for example, located roughly in the centre of everything, has a small resort village type setup. Other airstrips have camps and other settings.

The quality is generally quite good for these scenery elements. Some of the airstrips have a detailing that looks custom while others have a more generic look to them that will become familiar over time.

The textures for the ground are a mixed bag in my experience. The airports sometime look like natural extensions of the surrounding terrain while other times they have a repeating texture that looks more like a grey brown smear across the ground. It’s not bad, but it does sometimes stick out under certain lighting conditions. They are easy to spot for the most part so that helps.

Go on safari!

There are, as mentioned before, 12,000 placed animals spread out across the region. The animals are a mix of different species, seemingly local to the wildlife of the region, and they all appear to have high quality textures. Most of these are static so they won’t interact with your aircraft flying overhead in any way but some of them are the indeed animated types that do interact (Read that as run away!) with your aircraft… so that’s interesting. I wish they were all like that but I’m not sure what the restrictions are.

Either way, they do still add life to the experience and its fun to spot them as you cruise around. They are often the highlights of flying over the region.

Final thoughts

Though the price is similar to an aircraft release or a detailed international airport, this is not a single detailed airport but rather a whole region to explore. Okavango Delta doesn’t have big passenger terminals, that’s not what the area offers, and instead focuses on the 29 airports and helipads to fly around to. The proposition is a wide area to explore, the placed animals and sightseeing camps and, of course, the airports to land at. If you like low and slow hops from place to place focused on low altitude scenery, this is very well put together. This is calm, serene, backcountry flying. If, on the other hand, you’re more interested in some difficult to approach airstrips like you see with free and payware scenery, these aren’t that and you may be disappointed.

Okavango Delta by SimWorks Studios does give you the feeling of going on an aviation focused safari adventure. MSFS 2024’s superb scenery, auto-gen details, and vegetation system plus the custom work that SimWorks Studios has done to add the animals and airstrips really helps to bring the whole experience together. It’s even better than the original intent thanks to the newer sim’s features though you can get it for both sims and its just fine in 2020.

While the scenery itself is very well done, I do find the area offers less fun than carving canyons in the midwestern United States for example. That’s not unrealistic… that’s absolutely the experience of flying around in a very large river delta and wetland with no significant terrain elevation as far as the eye can see.

I think the biggest impediment to any kind of scenery pack is price for value. Scenery projects are expensive to put together and expensive to buy but, having plonked down quite a bit of cash in the past, I can safely say that this is a good one – so long as its the kind of flying and flight sim adventuring that you like to do.

You can purchase Okavango Delta from SimWorks Studios directly here or from Contrail or Orbx.

Screenshots