Review
March 12, 2012

Microsoft Flight

by Chris "BeachAV8R" Frishmuth

In the runup to the release of Microsoft Flight I did not fall victim to the Microsoft marketing blitz. Although “blitz” is actually the wrong word, since most of the marketing was done by beta testers themselves who were cleverly put under an NDA, thus making any and all information even more coveted. Pretty smart Microsoft! With a lot of other sims taking up the balance of my time, I didn’t even join the beta and figured I’d just wait for the release and follow community impressions along the way. Initial impressions, of course, were pretty damning. This would certainly not be a replacement for FSX. I’d often read comments such as: "I installed it, played it for 10 minutes, then uninstalled it.". Rut ro Shaggy. On release day, it was almost with passing interest that I decided to download the FREE version of Flight. After installing it — my first impression was: Wow. This is awesome. And terrible. And beautiful. And ugly. And compelling. And boring. If you’d rather not read the rest of this review I can only sum it up without explanation by saying Flight = Sybil (dissociative identity disorder). And yes, I’m as confused as you.

Flight is downloaded from the Internet as you would expect. The teaser product is free and includes the island of Hawaii with the other islands in the chain being paid DLC (downloadable content). The default free aircraft is the Icon A5 amphibian and if you register with Microsoft LIVE you also get a Stearman. I did not plan on purchasing any of the add-ons because I wasn’t actually planning on writing this review — but the Dark Side of the Force is strong and I eventually broke down and purchased the additional islands and the Maule M7. With the additional islands DLC you also get the Rans RV4 which I had no interest in but would later learn to appreciate.

Purchasing is predictably easy. Log on to the LIVE web site, purchase some Microsoft Points, and apply them to what you want. My total purchases were about $35 worth of content ($20 for the Hawaii Adventure Pack; $15 for the Maule). So essentially I bought a $35 game. Was it worth it? That is a very complicated question — to be addressed in this review.

Upon starting Flight you can enter a few configuration menus that allow you to setup graphics, controllers, and difficulty levels. I had no problem assigning functions to my Thrustmaster Warthog stick and throttle. My CH Pro Pedals were recognized, but despite there being “brake axis” assignments which is recognized, the differential braking does not work. There is also no check box for NaturalPoint TrackIR™ — because TrackIR is not supported. Yes, you read that correctly — no TrackIR support in Microsoft Flight. Keep reading and you'll understand why I suspect the "balloon guy" was responsible for this incredibly awful decision.

In my mind’s eye I envision the Microsoft Flight team gathered around a conference room table brainstorming the programming and Flight release. The most annoying and corny guy on the team raises his hand and says, "How about if the first thing we have the player do is slalom around some hot air ballons!" Instead of shooting the idea down as asinine and ridiculous, the coffee deprived marketing team puts it on their white board and somehow that makes it into the release product. That was the same guy that had you starting over Friday Harbor, airborne, in an ultralight stuttering along at 5 frames per second when FSX was released. I thought they fired that guy. If I seem bitter, it is because I am. First impressions are everything, and the "hot air balloon slalom course" doesn’t appeal to beginners, it doesn’t appeal to advanced users, and it doesn’t help sell flight simulators as fun at all. The only person in the entire known universe who thinks that is a good first impression is that doofus in the conference room.

Why am I so angry at the balloons? Well, because Flight is a product that is supposed to appeal to gamers. This is supposed to be a product that lures in people that don’t know they have an addiction to flying and then traps them in the vicious cycle of hardware / software / hardware upgrades that will have them spend thousands on their hobby. Gamers are not going to be impressed by slaloming around balloons. Everyone that hates slaloming around balloons uninstalled Flight after that intro (thus the "10 minutes and I’m gone" comments). Except me.

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So I persevered and did the stupid balloon mission. Flight has several options for your entertainment. You can Free Flight — set the weather, choose an airplane, go to the map and click on a location and away you go. Or you can do Missions or Challenges. Challenges are very short such as “Land X airplane on X airstrip”. There are lots of challenges, but the problem is they are all nearly exactly the same. After advancing through six Maule M7 landing challenges I recognized the pattern (I know, I’m slow that way) and can only assume the rest of them are the same. And here is where I bring up (once again) that I’m an interested and dedicated flight simmer with, what I believe to be, an open mind. And yet I grew quickly bored. So that new blood gamer that Microsoft is trying to lure in is going to reach their Boredom Quotient™ very quickly. Therein lies my ultimate problem with Flight: If Flight was designed to hook people into flight simulators all it shows is how boring our sims really are.

Don’t give up on me (or Flight) yet however. Flight is fairly stunning visually. It is hard to argue with their choice of the Hawaiian Islands as their introductory scenery. The graphics are very nice with beautiful water, clouds, haze effects, lighting, and overall texture quality. I have a relatively old rig (4 years old now) and I was still able to play at maxed out settings without much problem. Over heavily forested areas I’d get some slowdowns and when I coupled that with FRAPS recording I found I got better performance by setting everything to HIGH instead of maximum settings.

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The weather themes are pretty good, although they are not able to be modified. You have a dozen or so options ranging from clear skies to clouds, fog, storms, and windy conditions. It would be nice to have dynamic weather similar to FSX where the program downloads real weather from the internet and then replicates that in the simulator. That is not the case with Flight. What they do represent is quite good though and coupled with the exceptional graphics and lighting capabilities there is a definite “moodiness” to Flight that captures the feeling of flying quite well.

The representation of IFR flight is far superior to that of FSX — which had difficulty with transparent clouds in low IFR settings. In Flight you get a nice solid IFR layer down to minimums. The problem is that you can’t alter the settings — it is all or nothing. So you can’t set any particular ceiling that would be appropriate to the approach. The standard low IFR setting is very low indeed — down to ILS type minimums which means VOR approaches won’t really work. The RV4 and Maule are good IFR platforms since they have radios that are appropriate to the task. The Icon and Stearman are VFR only aircraft as one would expect.

Flight is frustratingly incomplete however. While you are on one hand given fairly good IFR, wind, and turbulence modeling, on the other hand you are given communication radios which serve no function whatsoever in the sim. Yes — you can set frequencies such as the ATIS and Tower in the comm radios, but they don’t do anything. So there is no way to find out what the winds, ceiling, visibility, or altimeter setting are. You could enable the “HUD” cheat and that puts up a little wind direction and strength icon, but the lack of any radio comms at all is pretty terrible.

Which brings me to my other major point in this review. The Flight environment, while beautiful and downright stunning in many respects is completely barren of life. It is as if a neutron bomb went off over Hawaii. Nothing moves. No cars, no sailboats, no people, and most glaringly missing in a game titled “Flight” — no other airplanes! Not only are there no planes flying around, there are no airplanes ANYWHERE! I think I might have seen a couple static helicopters somewhere, but the major international airports have NO AIRPLANES. All the gates are empty. The ramps are empty. The roads are empty. The ocean is empty. The sky is empty. There is no radio traffic. There are no birds. It is just you and your Microsoft Points flying around. It is no wonder the framerates are so darn good.

Experienced flight simmers will be horrified. Neophyte "new blood" simmers will think "so that’s it?" and go right back to playing Call of Duty on their X-Box. And therein lies the problem — we have a pretty good core simulation that does not appeal to experienced simmers nor does it appeal to new simmers. The other problem is that Flight made the "game" so simplistic that they managed to diminish any feeling of accomplishment you might derive from completing a complex task. For dedicated simmers we already recognize that feeling. Whenever I get the DCS: A-10C Warthog or the Ka-50 in DCS: Black Shark started I get a feeling of accomplishment — hey... I did that! With Flight it is more like going through the motions, and for me personally, I only did it hoping that somehow I would advance to a mission or challenge that would surprise me and hook me in.

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The "game" of Flight could have been something pretty good. Unfortunately the missions are repetitive, uninspiring, and for the most part just plain boring. Once you’ve done one “animal transport” it is hard to gin up the interest to do the other five that might be listed on the job board at each airport. The jobs range from sightseeing tours, to cargo missions, to passenger and photo shoots among others. Despite seeming different, they are all very much the same unfortunately.

There are some outliers of course. The mission where you go find and rescue the kayaker was somewhat interesting. The missions are interspersed with cut scenes and relatively corny voice acting. Passengers talk in your airplane, but the empty seat next to you makes you wonder if you are Tyler Durden. Or "I hear dead people".

The lineup of locked missions that are awaiting content allude to the future of the Flight franchise. With achievements such as "Mach 2" and "Mach 3" as well as "500,000 passengers carried" it isn’t hard to speculate something like an X-15 or a large airliner are in the pipeline. We can only hope that at some point you will be able to pull in to a terminal, see other aircraft taking off and landing, and hear some sort of ATC communication. I remain skeptical.

And unfortunately we have to put all of our hope eggs in the Microsoft basket since they have locked down Flight and are the sole owners of Flight content for the foreseeable future. Third party developers like Level-D and Flight1 have been effectively locked out of competing with Microsoft for additional content. That is troubling because you can market mediocrity when you don't have to reach the standards of your competitors.

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The problem with DLC is that you make a payment for a specific item that you have expectations about. Had Microsoft boxed up all the DLC into one package and put it on a shelf for $30 there might have been less perceived injustice than the a la carte model they are utilizing. My problem with the Hawaii DLC is that I’m not sure they really did the greatest job with it. There are certain areas that look pretty good, but then there are areas that totally miss the mark too. I had the good fortune of visiting Maui a few years ago and as an example check out the observatory on top of Maui. My photo shows the different colors and types of terrain while Flight just overlays the whole summit cauldron with green foliage. You get that sense when flying over some of the larger cities too, that they are quite generic looking. Honolulu looks more like the concrete jungle of Pyongyang than the vibrant city it really is. Molokini crater should be stuffed with dive boats and snorkelers, but it is not. When compared with the much larger scope of populating a world like FSX, it just seems that the relatively small Hawaiian Islands should have been detailed to the extreme.

The water is another source of annoyance. The ocean looks great with beautiful shades, moving waves and a believable coral reef system. Travel inland up a river or to an isolated lake and you’ll find the same ocean texture on all water, which makes inland water look just silly.

Dawn and dusk lighting are nice. Night lighting has to be taken with a grain of salt. Even with overcast clouds you are presented with a pretty bright landscape that looks more like something you’d see in night vision gear than true dark night.

The same quality issue is problematic with DLC aircraft as well. If I’m paying $15 for an aircraft, I have an expectation that it is more than a 3D object with a tweaked flight model. The Maule M7 is a fun airplane to fly, but the autopilot isn’t functional, and for some reason when you lean out the engine the fuel flow initially goes UP! In the RV4 leaning has no effect on cylinder head temperature. Indeed, as you lean it out everything stays rock steady until the engine quits when you reach the fuel starvation point. At least the NAV radios work and can be tuned to fly ILS approaches. With no ATC though, you are on your own to get onto the approach course. The map has a pretty good legend with NAV frequencies and, curiously, tower and approach frequencies that cannot be used.

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Regarding the flight models, the feeling of Flight is pretty good. I’d actually say it feels improved over FSX. The turbulence and dynamic motion is nice and there is even drag modeled by cross controlling and attempting forward slips. I tried some crosswind landings with the upwind wing down and cross controlled rudder and the side-slipping appeared to be a fair representation. Stalls and spins are merely OK. The RV4 seems to be supernaturally adverse to accelerated stalls. You can roll the RV4 into a 70 degree bank at any airspeed, haul back fully on the elevator and maintain that bank angle and altitude with full aft deflection of the elevator indefinitely. I would expect a fairly pronounced stall break at such a high G-loading and such a low airspeed (65 knots). Planes do seek their trimmed airspeed in a series of ever decreasing oscillations, which is encouraging. While the Maule will stall under sustained high-G banking, I was not able to get it to spin using traditional pro-spin inputs. I would expect the Maule would be easy to spin. The Stearman seems the most spinnable, although sustained inputs are required to keep it spinning. Releasing all of the controls causes it to exit the spin instantly. You would expect the Stearman would require anti-spin corrective actions to exit a spin. So the flight model at the fringes (stalls and spins) remains suspect in Flight just as it was in FSX.

The included (free) Icon A5 is actually a neat little airplane from a player’s perspective. It is intended as a VFR only aircraft and with the ability to land on airfields or water it does open up a lot of mission capabilities.

If the gamers stick around long enough to explore some of the Flight missions, they will actually learn a few things. The missions where you do aerobatics are actually pretty well done, as are some of the tutorials on things like the VASI and how to land the Icon A5. The most distracting thing is the mission text in the middle of the screen instead of being discretely placed at the top or bottom. There are glimmers of goodness in Flight that could and should have been expanded prior to this thing going LIVE (pun intended). Where they could have strung together an interesting and challenging career, you are instead left with repetitive tasks that quickly have you losing the faith.

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For those in the know we already realize that FSX overshadows the existence of Flight. Not just for advanced users either. Many have forgotten that FSX + Acceleration shipped with 88 challenging and diverse missions. They are far more advanced than anything I’ve yet seen with Flight, and far more entertaining. In addition, FSX has a full instructional syllabus with a course of Basic, Instrument, and Commercial flight missions with voiceovers and a virtual instructor. It will be interesting to see if Flight hooks anyone. If so, one would think we’d see an attendant uptick in FSX sales and participation as those new users seek a more complete game / simulation.

Another attempt by Flight to retain the interest of the user are "aerocaches" which are areas of interest to explore and find. In a case of horizontal integration, Microsoft embedded a tool that links directly to their Bing search engine. The premise is that you are given some clues, search on Bing, find the location, then navigate there in Flight to get aerocache points. Points add up to something like additional skill levels or added paint schemes. Unfortunately points don’t add up to Microsoft Points. If that were the case I might be compelled to take that crate of monkeys 180 miles to Kauai. The aerocaches are fairly unspectacular and some of them are even in places where nothing really exceptional is there to be seen other than the location itself (ie: Molokini Crater).

I was hopeful that the multiplayer part of Flight would fill that gapping void in the environment. I left a sign at all the airports I visited to meet me at the Pearl Harbor pier at noon. It worked for Will Smith in “I Am Legend”. Unfortunately (yes, that word again) the public multiplayer is full of kamikaze pilots and attention deficit gamers who jump in and out of games as if they are surfing channels. Occasionally I’d hook up with a few like minded people only to be slammed into by some idiot who had no interest in flying realistically. Private sessions are the way to go. Multiplayer connectivity seemed sporadic, although it was hard to tell if that was a result of people jumping around on the map or server issues. With Flight you can just go to the map, drag your plane icon anywhere you want and you will appear there. That makes it easy for people to just spring up nearby, or disappear into the ether. Whatever the case, it makes for a suspension of disbelief killer. When I was flying in formation with other players there was occasional significant warping which could be indicative of slow connections for other users.

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Conclusion

So Flight is here. The good news is the base module is free, so there is no excuse not to try it out. The pay content is OK, but not stellar. In fact, I’ve decided that I probably won’t buy the announced Alaska DLC if it is more of the same type of content. After spending a significant amount of time with Flight I just don’t feel that compelled to pursue any more achievements or challenges — they just don’t feel like achievements or challenges. The game is too simple, too dull, and too lifeless. I try to be optimistic and think of Flight as a base module from which great things may spring. The environments are beautiful, the framerate performance fantastic, and the feeling of flight is quite good. They can go in either of two ways (or both) in my opinion. They can make it a better game by making the missions harder, more diverse, and more populated with interesting things. Or, they can make it a better simulation by making the missions harder, more diverse, and more populated with interesting things. (See what I did there?) As it stands, Flight will not attract and keep non-flight sim fans. They will try it, get bored, and lump every other simulator in with Flight as dull as watching paint dry. That does damage to our genre at the expense of a one-shot expenditure on Flight. Meanwhile, flight sim enthusiasts will shy away because for $35 I feel like I didn’t get enough value out of my money, and I’d be gun shy about purchasing more DLC that will leave me disappointed. Flight knew that it was taking a different path with this release. In their attempt to appeal to the masses, they actually are appealing to no one.

PS — Microsoft… please fire the balloon mission guy.

Good

• Graphics
• Framerates
• Environments
• Ease of install
• Respectable flight model

Could Be Better

• Gameplay (more complex missions)
• Multiplayer capabilities
• More sophisticated aircraft
• More aircraft systems realism
• NaturalPoint TrackIR support
• Air Traffic Control (ATC)
• Other airplanes, boats, birds, bugs... anything!
• Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS)
• Modifiable weather
• Better quality DLC all around

Reviewer's System Specs

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700
• Motherboard: ASUS P5N32-E Deluxe
• Memory: Crucial Ballistix 4GB DDR2 6400
• Video: NVIDIA 285 GTX
• Hard Drive: Western Digital Raptor X 150GB
• Saitek X52 Pro HOTAS CH Pro Rudder Pedals
• NaturalPoint TrackIR4 PRO

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