ALL-TIME HIGH

MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR takes ‘open world’ very literally.

- Phil Iwaniuk

NEED TO KNOW

WHAT IS IT? A flight sim with all the world to enjoy

EXPECT TO PAY £60

DEVELOPER Asobo Studio

PUBLISHER Xbox Game Studios

REVIEWED ON i7 9700K, RTX 2080 TI, 16GB RAM

MULTIPLAYER Yes

LINK bit.ly/2Qa2oF1

Do you ever wonder how it’d feel to take a few years away from games, and then peek back through the curtain once you’d become out of touch? Quite often, Microsoft Flight Simulator feels like that peek. In its scope and fidelity, it seems to be visiting from the future, when it’s commonplace to have access to a photorealistic Planet Earth and the freedom to explore it. When you can hop in a plane and fly over your own town, in the same weather conditions and lighting you can see outside your window. When ‘open world’ truly means just that.

What a dramatic way for the Microsoft Flight Simulator series to reappear after years under Dovetail’s DLC-focussed stewardship, and what a towering achievement from Asobo Studio. We’ll be talking about the impossible detail of its 1:1 world map for years to come; reading retrospectives about how this piece of software changed environmental design; wandering around other games that harness petabytes of real map data and Cloud AI grunt as a matter of course.