2020 has been a pretty terrible year. There's no dancing around it, a global pandemic has impacted the entire world, locked everyone inside for safekeeping, and grounded flights — or any other attempts to travel. So what a perfect time for a flight sim to launch, really, when everyone (myself included) is stuck inside, yearning for greener pastures. 

But before I continue, let me tell you a tale of upset, of despair, of false hope, and eventual triumph. This might sound like I'm leading into a story about learning to fly in Flight Simulator, but alas, this story is much more boring. This is the tale of the installation of Flight Simulator. Upon receiving a review code for the game from Microsoft, I plugged it into the Microsoft Store on my PC, and redeemed it. So far, so good. Then, I was prompted to install it. Uh oh. The MS store doesn't want to install it on anything but my C:/ drive. That's a problem, because I'm using a 128 GB SSD as my boot drive, and a 2 TB hard disk for game storage. Flight Sim is over 150 GB, that's not gonna fly (pun intended). 

To cut a long story short, after changing a bunch of settings to no avail, and spending far too many hours googling solutions, I discovered that it simply is not possible to install MS Store apps and games on a drive formatted to exFAT... which my storage drive was. Cue the 11 hour process of backing up, formatting, and restoring all my files (or don't cue it, because I decided an hour in I didn't care and just wiped the whole thing), then installing the game. Which turned out to (kind of) be a total waste of time, because the MS Store download is just the game's 90 MB launcher, and you then get to choose where files are installed to. I say kind of there, because no matter what I did, I could not get that launcher to even attempt to install on my tiny boot drive, so it doesn't matter anyway, I still would've had to format my storage drive. And then, after all that nonsense, I had to sit through 4 hours of Flight Sim music while the launcher installed the game — a launcher that had to be open the entire time, with no option to turn the music off. I just muted my PC and walked away. I know this isn't entirely related to Flight Sim, and I apologise for dedicating so much time to it, but it was genuinely the worst, most frustrating install experience of my life. But wow, it was worth it. 

My experiences with Flight Sim have been nothing short of incredible. I started with the tutorial, as one should with games. It's a casual, laid back tutorial, in one of the easier (but not easy) planes on offer, with a friendly and experienced instructor talking you through all the basics required. It's split up into a few different segments, with the first teaching you the basics of staying level, the next teaching you to turn and change course, how to dip and dive. Given the complexity of the game, it's an incredibly effective tutorial, quickly teaching you just about everything you need to know to become a world-class pilot (okay maybe not quite world-class), though I do wish my instructor had spoken a liiiittle bit more quickly sometimes. At one point, after being taught how to dip the nose of my plane downwards, she decided it was a good time to go into a personal anecdote about her first flying lesson. It would have been a nice, personal moment... had I not been careening towards the ground at an alarming pace, having not yet been taught how to turn the nose of my plane back up. I crashed, and presumably died, and had to redo the entire segment (thankfully without crashing this time). You live and you learn. Or, I guess, you die and then thank god you're playing a video game and not flying a real plane. 

It's a little difficult reviewing something that is, ostensibly, not really a game. Normally I'd talk about the game's story, how it controls, its music and visuals, its characters. A lot of that is, of course, missing here, because at the end of the day, Flight Simulator isn't a game, it's exactly what it says on the box — a flight simulator. But there are a few game-y things we can look at, before I take a plunge into how this game made me feel, and what it did for me. 

Firstly, let's talk about the controls. Before jumping into Flight Sim, I was told that it was "entirely playable" with the mouse and keyboard, which is good, because I don't have a flight yoke system, and I wasn't going to buy one for a single review. Looking back, "playable" was probably a teensy bit of a stretch, because sure, it absolutely is technically playable with a mouse and keyboard, but it's not exactly the best experience. See, the main draw of Flight Sim is that these planes are operated like real planes, and handle like real planes. And real planes rely a lot on a high degree of fine analogue movement, physical pieces moving fractions of an inch to keep level. That's not something you can effectively do when your key states are on or off, and it can lead to some horrific under-adjustment, over-adjustment, and then eventually a crash — I should know, it happened to me many many times. It's also not super ideal to be click around the cockpit with your cursor for important controls, especially when you're in a crisis, panicking and trying to click on the right thing while your plane inches closer and closer to the ground. 

Instead, I'd suggest plugging in a controller, fiddling about with sensitivities and controls, and relying pretty heavily on the sim's assists. Those assists, by the way, are incredibly robust, and they allow a pretty fine level of control over how you play. Sometimes you just won't want to spend hours fiddling with hyper-accurate controls and flight behaviours, and just want to have a nice casual flight to a nice-looking area. And that's fine, there's no penalty for playing one way or another, at the end of the day, Flight Sim is about what you want. 

On the second game-ish point is the visuals, and oh my lord, what a treat. Flight Sim looks utterly incredible, at almost every single moment you could possibly imagine. I mean it should, of course, it uses a lot of photography and satellite data to build up the world, but it's still absolutely mesmerising. Playing on an RTX 2070, I was able to run it at its highest settings at 1080p, and still maintain a solid 60fps. The lighting, the environments, the water, it all just looks phenomenal — and that's without the latest technology like ray tracing, which have yet to be implemented. That a game can present the world — our world, every inch of it — in such a gorgeous way should almost be criminal. It almost, just barely, makes the real world look a little dull.  

I mentioned earlier that I, like many others, have been yearning for life outside of my own home for most of the year. I live in regional Tasmania, and as such most of my friends and loved ones live pretty much everywhere except here. One of my yearly traditions is taking a trip to Melbourne during PAX Australia, meeting up with my friends and my colleagues, and just taking in the city. This year, for obvious reasons, I could not do that, but Flight Sim gave me something, just a little taste of the experience. I set up a passenger aircraft, set a route from Hobart to Melbourne, and flew the whole thing in real time. It was an hour of my life I normally would've spent cramped inside a plane, complaining about the lack of legroom, worried about the person two seats over coughing their lungs up. But now, with the world in shambles and no firm end-date in sight, I would take it all, right now, in a heartbeat. Flight Sim gave me a tiny glimpse of that experience, and it was a bitter-sweet moment. It was a tiny slice of normality, a reminder of what I could have, should have, been looking forward to this year. It was heartbreaking, but it was comforting. And in lieu of actually being able to travel anywhere I like, Flight Sim might not be a perfect replacement. But it's something to hold onto. And sometimes that's enough. 

Microsoft's latest Flight Simulator is not really a game. It's an experience, and obviously, a simulator. It's both the closest you can get to piloting a plane in the real world, and a somewhat gamified way to play pretend. It's beautiful, and breathtaking, and challenging. There's nothing quite like Flight Simulator, nothing that does quite what it does with such a fantastic degree of accuracy. It is, put simply, an unmatched experience.