It’s no secret that Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has had a bit of a rough start. Installation problems, network troubles, content and gameplay issues have plagued the sim since launch. It was perhaps silly of me, in retrospect, to think that I’d be able to write up a full review of the sim by early 2025 which was my initial plan. Instead, consider this editorial a status check-in on how the sim is doing, how I see it progressing, and what things are hopefully going to look like over the next several months. More importantly, should you buy it right now or wait?

Not the launch that anyone wanted

I don’t think anyone wanted the launch of MSFS 2024 to go the way that it did. Initial excitement drove huge amounts of traffic beyond what the system was capable of handling and so instead of checking out the new sim, we were all fighting the 97% loading screen or dealing with content not streaming in on our systems.

Reportedly, the issue was in the Content Distribution Network (CDN) rather that in the servers themselves though ultimately, from an end user perspective, it doesn’t matter all that much. In the grand scheme of things, the difficult launch will be a blip that we’ll have forgotten about several months from now but it certainly left a sour taste right from the start.

If that initial post launch excitement and server issues had been solved and the rest of the sim was working as expected, I think we would have soon forgotten that. Unfortunately, that’s not all that’s wrong with MSFS 2024 right now as the new sim has a long list of issues.

I think Career mode is eventually going to be great

One of the core features that had a lot of folks excited was the new Career mode. While MSFS 2020’s open flying nature is excellent for large numbers of people, others gravitate to a more curated and guided experience and while the challenges and bush plane trips of 2020 were fine, people were hoping for something a bit more interactive. That’s where Career mode comes in!

The core of the design of this feature looks to be a good one. You start at the beginning with basic pilot training in a Cessna 172. After you’ve got a few flights under you, your career progresses with the ability to fly more planes, take on different jobs, and earn a living as a pilot either flying short trips or engaging in more specific experiences. You can fight forest fires, ferry VIPs, engage in agricultural spray projects, and more.

That’s the promise of the feature anyways and while it does manage to deliver on this promises, it currently struggles a whole lot with bugs and some design choices.

The bugs are serious game interrupting ones like asking you to park your airplane in a spot currently occupied by a building or some trees. Since that’s impossible, the mission is a failure. More hilarious are ones where your just spawned aircraft drops from the sky and lands upside down or is parked on top of a building. Can’t fly it, so the mission failure. Sometimes you can complete a successful mission but then get an error message on the mission completion screen. Time wasted.

It also seems maddening that you have to grind your way through the career system to get to some of the more interesting missions. I want to do search and rescue missions and firefighting missions and I know, in the current scheme of how its setup, that it’s going to be many hours of grinding to get there.

The designers have also tried to make this a more immersive experience with talking NPCs interacting with each other on the plane. In theory its a nice idea but in practice the dialogue can be repetitive and irritating if you’ve heard it a dozen or so times.

None of these are fatal flaws. Eliminate a lot of the bugs, ensure that the experience is working the way it should, and open up the mission system a bit and this very quickly becomes a fun experience.

More than all of that, its clear that people want the Career mode to work. Despite the bugs, I see people posting about Career experiences weeks and now months on from release when they already know that they are going to have problems. That says to me that what we have is enticing, desired, and when it works its enjoyable too. Solve the problems and Career mode is going to be good.

Activities has potential too

It’s not just career mode. MSFS 2024 has expanded activity mode and the potential here is great. The photo mode where you go and take photos at a location sounds great. I’ve done a few of the challenges already and they were fun. But it also doesn’t always work.

For example, some of us hopped into some hot air balloons hoping to do one of the challenges where you need several balloons in the image at once to get the achievement … except the moment you bring up the photo mode other players disappear. We tried everything to make it work and it just doesn’t. It’s just not achievable.

I did another challenge where I was supposed to get a shot of my float plane next to a shrine in Japan only for a voice over to repeatedly warn me about landing on the water. I tolerated it for a couple of minutes before I just couldn’t handle it any more and quit the experience.

There are some good experiences out there too! Many of the low level challenges are great such as flying the Hornet through Mach Loop. I’ve done some of the courses that take you down a mountain in New Zealand in the Cub that was absolutely compelling. Competing against my friends in these challenges has already been fun and I’m sure I will have more!

Some of the new aircraft are great, some need more work

Hop into an aircraft in MSFS 2024 and you’re going to experience a mixed bag of experiences.

Most of the aircraft I’ve experienced so far are fantastic. The GotFriends created bushplanes (the Norden and Draco X) were awesome from day one. A lot of the older aircraft from 2020 have been upgraded and given more interactivity. The airliners we have now are good too and that includes the everything from the Saab 340B from Carenado, the A310, A320, A321 and A330 airliners from iniBuilds. We have good helicopters with the Cabri G2 being a favourite and the R66 being surprisingly good too. The Cessna 172, as boring as it is, has seen upgrades, and so did the DA62 which has picked up extra detailing work and an electrical systems simulation that it didn’t have before. There are more I haven’t flown yet.

Most of them have reasonably deep systems, fantastic modeling and sounds, they support the new walkaround mode, they have panels that you can open up, and you hop into them and the avionics are all WorkingTitle upgraded units that are as good as they’ve ever been.

I’ve flown Miltech’s C-17, iniBuilds A400m, Carenado’s PC-12 and PC-24 the HU-16 Albatross and many more. They were all engaging and compelling. They look great and they have a lot going on in them. Are they the most detailed experiences possible? No. There are payware options out there (like A2A’s Commanche) that are going to surpass all of these, but when you consider that these are the “default” airplanes of the sim I have to hand it to Microsoft, Asobo, and their partners for really doing an outstanding job. There is a lot of value here for most flight simmers.

As good as many of them are, we’ve got problems too. Aircraft like the Zlin Shock Ultra from MSFS 2020 surprisingly doesn’t work very well. Some buttons don’t work and the needle on the speed gauge… Yep, that is completely missing! The DA62 that I enjoy so much, still doesn’t have a working deicing system after four years.

The Dornier Sea Star is such a cool airplane. One that I was and am excited to fly but the last time I flew it, part of its livery is sitting awkwardly in the cabin instead of on the wings.

The PC-24 that I was enjoying fairly recently has only just been rescued from controls that didn’t work and landing gear and systems that refused to operate. The CL-415 was another one that gave me grief not letting me raise the gear.

It’s made all the more annoying because sometimes you just don’t know if its a bug or a mistake you’re making as someone new to one airplane or another.

Content streaming has a future but it needs work

MSFS 2024 is pushing the technical envelope and the ability to stream in aircraft content is a big change from what we saw with 2020. Already in 2020 we had ortho imagery streaming in but the new sim takes it a step further. Streaming in whole aircraft, points of interest, as well as the ortho imagery as before is a step beyond and its also a level of integration between servers and systems that we really haven’t seen before either.

This all has its up sides. The memory storage footprint of my MSFS 2024 install, even with the rolling cache set higher than default, is still quite small compared to what MSFS 2020 is currently consuming on my drives (nearly 1 TB!). Keeping multiple world updates installed required hundreds of gigabytes of storage alone and this solves that problem. It also introduces some new problems.

The biggest issue I’m having is that the UI and even the landscape streaming is often slow to react. I sometimes don’t know if the problem I’m having is because something hasn’t streamed in yet or if there’s a specific issue I’m having with a certain aircraft.

Some have reported that aircraft in some instances may become corrupted as they stream in and you’re left needing to clean it out of the cache and try again. I’m not sure what the veracity of that is but it together with more basic things like clicking an aircraft and waiting for it to eventually appear in the UI just gives a feeling of everything being a bit slow and sluggish.

Even on something that MSFS 2020 seemed to have sorted out, I’m still finding some landscapes that were razor sharp with their visuals back in 2020 and are more blurry in 2024. Or airports that stream in as I’m arriving at them with the runway markings obscured because the texture resolution is too low.

My internet connection is advertised as a 45 Mbps connection and I’m pretty close to that according to various speed tests. It’s a solid reliable connection most of the time so the problem seems to either be that I need more bandwidth or there’s just issues with sending the content out to my system.

Either way I feel like streaming everything in is perhaps a step too far. The points of interest and airport scenery packages streaming in generally work for me but I’d like to have more aircraft installed locally. Reportedly, these features are coming so I hope that we’ll see improvements on things as the sim evolves this year.

Flight model has stepped forward

One thing that has changed universally for the better is the flight model. Be it on the ground or in the air, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 aircraft have more weight, more presence, more life in them than their 2020 counterparts.

The way that the aircraft rock back and forth on the ground when the engine is running, the general rolling resistance and experience when taxiing into a turn, or way the aircraft moves when you brake hard or gently. It’s better for sure! So too is the handling on different surfaces off runway. Sand bars and grass fields are far more interesting now and not just in the visual department (although that is better!) which makes for a more satisfying experience.

Take the aircraft into the air and it’s once again quite a bit better. Rolling the airplane feels more realistic, the nose moves around more naturally, and it all feels like there’s a lot more going on under the hood than before. That’s because there is quite a bit more going on and the investments that Asobo have made in flight model have paid off.

It’s not all roses in this area and there are some problems. One of the biggest that I’ve experienced is with helicopters and ground effect. Sometimes they are ok, sometimes they are all over the place. Landing on a platform seems to cause some sort of bug with the model that causes the helicopters to behave uncontrollably at times.

Now, I know some X-Plane purists will be in the comments talking about how that sim is better than this one in flight modeling. The simple truth is that X-Plane 12 retains the edge and its decades of flight model tweaking definitely has its advantages. That sim still feels more natural than this one does, however, my impression is also that the differences are now even smaller than they have ever been. Both sims offer reasonably natural handling to aircraft in ways that we just haven’t seen in the past.

I can’t wait to see how some developers manage to tune their aircraft models too because I think we’re going to have some terrifically accurate handling airplanes in this sim as time goes on and everyone gets to know the tools better.

The interface is a mixed bag

There are parts of the new interface in MSFS 2024 that I really like and other parts that feel like they aren’t done yet or are a step backwards.

The aircraft selection screen is much more clunky than it was before and I don’t think it was the best system before either. We’ve lost the ability to sort turboprops from other types of aircraft for one. The length wise scrolling seems to take up more screen space and show me less airplanes. It took me a while to learn to look in the variants section to find certain versions of aircraft. And there are inconsistencies with some aircraft having data filled out while others don’t. The King Air 350i also appears as a tiny icon rather than the same size as those next to it.

Then there’s the speed of the UI being drawn on screen which is surprisingly slow. Some of that is the streaming part of the system where you select an airplane and then it has to be streamed to you. There’s not enough indication that we’re still waiting for it to load versus it’s given up and died to know if I should wait or not. A progress bar of some sort would help immensely.

Of course the Marketplace is just not available yet so its hard to look at that. Sometime soon we’ll see that open up and hopefully we’ll see more content flowing in after that too.

The EFB is a generally strong point. Compared to what we had with the VFR map and the world screen back in MSFS 2020, the new tablet interface created by WorkingTitle is a revelation. The integration of flight planning, charts, checklists, a moving map, and more into this interface is great and the ability to go in there and get so many references to airport information, frequencies and more in such a tightly designed UI is also impressive.

That said, the UI isn’t perfect and some aspects of the flight planning interface took me quite a while to parse through. Some of it I’m still trying to figure out. I also find the controls on the tablet for configuring the fuel and weight to be a step backwards from where we were before. The simple grid now seems more difficult to use, harder to drag values around, and just not quite as intuitive as it was before.

Still, I’m very happy about the overall impression that this tablet system makes. It works from almost any screen, it has a lot of features already, and it was designed to be extensible so WorkingTitle and third parties can bring their own stuff into it. What cool ideas get dreamt up over the next year or two I have no idea but I’m sure they will be great!

It is visually incredible!

One area that has consistently impressed me is with the visuals. MSFS 2020 was impressive enough and over the years we’ve seen it generally improve to look even better than it did at launch. MSFS 2024 surpasses it in most ways with a lighting system that is even more impressive in most situations, the new tessellated ground details add rocks, grasses and all sorts of little doodads that massively improve the look when you’re bush flying or putting in some time in a helicopter. The trees are just draw dropping with the detail and density far surpassing the flat blobby things from 2020.

In nearly all instances the clouds look better, the weather effects are just as good as or better than before, lights are better (though we did have overly bright and then overly dim lights in some instances for a few patches there), and the way that grass and dirt move aside when you land off field is excellent.

Some places of the world are really truly breathtaking as well. I flew from Grand Canyon airport up to the Grand Canyon itself in a helicopter and was absolutely gobsmacked when I got to the canyon. It was incredible. I’ve also gone to the Sierra Nevada mountains and been blown away by that scenery and then I travelled to Patagonia, on the southern tip of South America, and been stunned by that scenery too. I have no idea if I’ll visit all of these places in my lifetime but MSFS 2024 looks so incredible that I feel like I’m nearly there.

I have little to complain about in the new sim. Some drawing of the clouds at a distance does seem like a step back and some of the colour filtering at low light situations, particularly on clouds (again), seems a bit off versus the objects in the foreground. Still, most of what I see is just incredible.

You will still find awkward spots where trees, buildings, roads and cars don’t quite line up. It’s improved over 2020 by leaps and bounds but that’s been hard to fix obviously. Bridges remain a sore spot too with custom created ones looking great and photogrammetry derived ones looking horrendous. There is still the slightly melted cheese look to some buildings. This is typical of older photogrammetry rather than newer methods so you can’t always blame the sim itself for that but the data that its used.

The sim also still needs more time spent on airports that aren’t part of the custom handcrafted scenery. Many of them have unusual bumps, building placement that is less than accurate or aesthetically pleasing, the wrong buildings are sometimes there or they look so generic that they stick out. They need work and the scenery gateway project should help over time but as of launch these are still issues.

It’s going to be great! (Eventually!)

There’s more I could say but I think at this point I want to end this editorial by saying that I have mixed feelings about Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. I think it will be great… but not just yet.

It’s clear to me that the overall design and goals of this update to the sim are relatively sound. Free flight, the new activities and challenges, and even career mode were all reasonably well conceived at their core. The sounds, graphics, flight model and even ground handing are better than they ever were under the previous sim and this all shows obvious signs of the sim evolving. That gives me a lot of hope, together with Asobo and Microsoft’s dedication with solving the woes of MSFS 2020, that they will sort out the problems and that all of this will become very enjoyable.

Unfortunately right now, despite good designs and intentions, there are significant problems with MSFS 2024. From buggy airplanes to activities and challenges that don’t work properly to a career mode that has needed and requires more updates to solve game breaking bugs. It’s clear that this all needs more polish and more development time.

My feeling is that MSFS 2024 shipped before it was really ready to go and as a result it needs time to mature. I feel confident that it will mature because by both words and actions, the team behind this project have shown that they are in it for the long haul and that they are willing to continue to work to make it a better sim. MSFS 2020 was also lacking a lot at launch and four years later it has evolved into a polished experience that has offered me thousands of hours of high quality entertainment. Its clear that MSFS 2024 is going to be the better sim having evolved all that 2020 was good at and added on in every capacity. It’s struggling with making it all work the way its supposed to right now but once it does it will be a flight sim experience for the ages.

Should you buy MSFS 2024 right now? It’s a tough call but I think if you mostly enjoyed free flight experiences in 2020, you can jump to the new sim and continue on with what is going to be a better looking, better flying, and better overall operating sim. If you’re into it for the career and activities modes, I think you may want to wait it out until those have been given more polish. Once they have, I think this sim is really going to shine!

Sometime later this year I will write my definitive review of MSFS 2024 after the sim has had a chance to mature and I’ve had a chance to live with it for quite a bit longer. I don’t feel like I can do that until both of those things have come true, so for now consider this an editorial on where we are at with promise of a full, in-depth, accounting of where the sim is at sometime later this year.