Having played Microsoft Flight Simulator X since forever, the new iteration required a new PC (check simulation requirements). So, not a cheap upgrade! The simulation has an annoying glitch that requires the DVD to be in the drive to use the simulation. I understand there are fixes for this but it shouldn’t happen in the first place. Gameplay is, however, superb with scenery and dynamic features rendering cleanly and seamlessly (check for PC requirements as above). The aircraft are a little skittish and great care has to be taken getting used to handling them with a (new) flight yoke. WiFi with a bandwidth of 50MBPS is required to play in real world scenarios. Most people’s WiFi is probably below this optimum speed (mine included). Instructions and guides are not, in my opinion, as accessible as they might be. I have only been using this simulation for a couple of weeks and so am still in a steep learning curve. All that said, I can only recommend this software highly and, without the glitches, this would be a 5-star review.

Liked – fantastic graphics, disliked very long installation time. Also you have to leave a disc in the drive for it to do auto updates, was delivered on time as requested.

Haven’t played computer games for years although I’m into 3D printing (FDM & Resin) which can take hours to produce one of your designs, so I decided to buy Microsoft flight simulator to use up some of those hours waiting.
One major issue my PC wasn’t man enough to run it, a few pounds (quite a few actually) further on I now have a super fast PC, was it worth spending all that money on?..well yes IMHO it was.
What a fantastic breathtaking beautifully made simulation never would I have thought that I could fly an aeroplanecan’t land very well but that’s a minor detail.
The down sides..flipping heck nearly 5 hours to load 10 DVD’s and then another 4 hours even with a 74mbs download speed to download 84gb of extra content.come on Microsoft get with modern technology and improve on it.
Even the start up time to run the game gives you time to make a cup of tea and 2 slices of toast AND make a doctors appointment, joking aside it needn’t be that slow.
After all that though it is well worth 120 for the premium deluxe version.

This software is amazing, I fly light aircraft and this software is like the real thing, all the buttons work, you can fly anywhere in the world, land at any airport, set any weather conditions, the ATC is accurate,
It really is just like the real thing, I also have the sailtek yoke, radio box, auto pilot box, pedals, and switch box, which all make it more realistic, Instrument flying is also great, you can practice your instrument approaches using this, they are just like the real thing, Highly recommended

This is incredible, yes you need quite a high spec machine but the graphics and the realism is brilliant. A friend who is a commercial airline pilot tried flying the A320 and he was very impressed and the handling and realism. It takes forever to install and can be a bit hit and miss but eventually I got it to run. Having the disc in the cd rom all the time is not so good. Even though this version is less than a year old there is tons of free content available online as well as quite a lot of overpriced content in the Flightsim Marketplace. Its very easy to become hooked and before you know it your setting it to fly with the autopilot in realtime or trying manually. Very clever and totally absorbing

This was bought as a gift, but no bad feedback so far!

This is a mega game. Since buying it I have had 3 large updates for Japan USA and worldwide.

Fantastic, takes ages to load 10 discs, then the updates but still fantastic, just remember when asked to insert the game disc it is disc 1.

To be honest for me the very long install went very well followed by a 19gb upgrade to the deluxe edition. Running on an i7 processor and a 1070 nvidia Graphics card with SSD and 32gb of ram I thought I was going to need to upgrade my system to get the best out of this software. I have to say without altering any settings the software runs very well at 4k with high settings. Very happy about that. One annoyance is after the install it linked the game to the wrong email address, I had no other options so next week I will speak to Microsoft about this, but I’m not expecting any help about this.
One thing that has made me angry, I have used my Microsoft Sidewinder Pro for many years, it’s a controller that is perfect for this sim having a throttle on a rolling control and a twist on the stick ideal for rudder. Plenty of buttons for a lot of your needed switches to hand. NOT COMPATIBLE, it feels like Microsoft doing what they have done over the years when they stop support on many very good bits of hardware.
Due to this I decided I would buy the Honeycomb yoke and some pedals. As of 30/08/20 there are no Honeycombe yokes or pedals available anywhere in the uk, and I believe this is the same problem in Canada.
Some slight problems in the game but this is to be expected. I think over the coming months there will be lots of fixes and updates. Nothing in my issues would have stopped me buying this and I would recommend buying this superb graphically accurate bit of software

I tried to buy this from Amazon on Disc, since my internet connection isn’t fantastic, but Amazon failed to get it for release day, so I ended up buying it direct from Microsoft and just putting up with the fact it would take a day to download. That day is due to my internet connection, not due to Microsoft issues which some people report.

Once downloaded, it has to be said, it is very impressive in some areas, though lacking polish in others. The graphics are, quite simply, stunning. It’s not just the level of detail they have in towns, airports etc. but it’s how smooth everything runs. It’s worth acknowledging I’m running it on a high end machine, Intel i7 (7700 series), 32Gb of RAM, SSD, GTX1080 graphics board, so you would expect it to run well, but the important thing to note is it runs noticeably better than XPlane.

I’m getting more consistent higher frame rates with MS Flight Sim than I do with XPlane, so while you do need a great PC to run it well (I’m on High graphics settings across the board – suspect I’d need an NVIDIA 2000 series to run ultra), the point is it runs better than the competition, and the visuals are better as well.

Also impressive is the flight model. I do have a Private Pilots License, so have a good handle on how flying a Cessna 172 feels, and it is remarkably accurate. While obviously that doesn’t mean I can say things like the airliners feel like they really do, it’s not a difficult assumption to make.

What is less good is some of the fairly blatant bugs. The most crippling one I’ve found has been with the A320 and it’s auto-pilot. While the flight planning is terrific, and the Flight Management Computer in the sim sets itself up automatically based on the flight planning (this is much better than in XPlane), the problem is it is just hopelessly unreliable. Vertical Navigation and Auto Throttle is really glitchy, and I’ve found it impossible to complete a flight without needing to do significant amounts of hand flying.

And there’s various things throughout like that.

I’m hoping that they are all relatively minor bugs that they will knock down quickly, since it does limit some of the things you would choose to do with the sim.

Right now I’d say it’s excellent for VFR flight, and in the 172 it is genuinely remarkable. But they need to add polish to it.