Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Deluxe Edition

Microsoft Flight Simulator is the new installment of the legendary civilian flight simulator series. The French team Asobo Studio, which in 2019 released the award-winning action adventure A Plague Tale, is responsible for the project: Innocence.

Gameplay

The game is the first full-scale installment of the series since Microsoft Flight Simulator X, released in 2006. In contrast to the simplified Microsoft Flight, we get a powerful simulator that covers the entire Earth with its range and offers as many as thirty-seven thousand airports. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 in the basic version allows you to sit behind the controls of 20 aircraft. The player has at his disposal mainly units of general aviation such as Cessna 172, aerobatic planes and huge passenger machines with Boeing 747 at the head.

The authors have put emphasis on realism. Compared to FSX, not only the simulation of individual systems and flight models of aircraft has been improved, but also the variability of air masses near mountains or tall buildings has been mapped. Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 also introduces such important novelty as realistic longitudinal inclination of runways and different types of surfaces.

The game offers special tutorials to guide you step-by-step through the starting procedures of each aircraft and the subsequent stages of flight. The level of realism can be adjusted to the user's experience. On lower difficulty settings, the aircraft can be controlled fully from the external view, with all key flight parameters - these are displayed in the corners of the screen through a simplified interface.

The simulator is also enhanced with multi-layered volumetric clouds, and weather data is downloaded in real time from the web.

Technical issues

The game has an impressive graphic design. Machines have been recreated to the smallest detail, and locations are dripping with detail thanks to the use of photogrammetry and satellite images taken for the Bing Maps service. Such solutions have their limitations, and map detail usually suffers as a result, which is why some familiar airports and objects were modeled by hand. Microsoft Flight Simulator's artificial intelligence, developed by Blackshark.ai, also helped generate the scenery, providing terrain recognition and filling it with default objects such as trees and buildings. Huge amounts of data are downloaded on the fly from the Azure virtual cloud.

The game offers multi-controller support: from mouse and keyboard, to gamepad, to joysticks and HOTAS headsets.