Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

Written by Jason Dailey on 12/2/2025 for PS5  

In the 1990s, when I was a much younger lad, I would sometimes spend the weekend at a cousin’s house. They had a computer that was more powerful than what I had at home, where I was still running games off floppy disk. Instead, their rig could run classics like the original Thief, and Microsoft Flight Simulator 98. They even had a flight joystick for the greatest sense of immersion. So, my cousin and I would take turns attempting to fly planes, quite often unsuccessfully, and quite often finishing with a crash landing. It was hard to imagine video games getting any better than that, and it was also the last flight MFS game I had played until now.

And now, here I am, playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 on my PlayStation 5 Pro, zooming in on the roof of my house, and visiting some of the world’s greatest wonders from my recliner in far greater detail than I could ever dream possible nearly 30 years ago. I’m both in awe of how far the series has come, yet disappointed that not everything works as well as I’d hoped.

MFS 2024 is absolutely jam-packed with content. There is so much to do that I can easily see it taking dozens, if not hundreds of hours to complete everything on offer. There’s career mode, challenge league, activities, world photographer mode, and free flight mode. But within each of those modes are hours upon hours of activities.

Career mode lets you create your own pilot and begin your aviation journey by first acquiring your private pilot license, followed by your commercial pilot license, and dozens of additional certifications. You start out rather humbly, flying scenic tours in a Cessna 172 Skyhawk, but work your way up to dousing wildfires, flying search & rescue, and piloting massive Boeing 737 Max commercial airliners. Gaining experience and increasing your reputation unlocks these various specializations, which also require you to purchase certifications using credits earned from completing jobs. You only have to purchase each certification once, but you must be judicious in choosing your career path because it does take time to build credits back up to be able to purchase the next certification. So, if you end up hating helicopter tours, you’ll need to grind it out a little bit to move on to something else.

You could play nothing else but Career mode and probably feel satisfied, but I’d recommend dabbling in all the things. World photographer mode is a challenge mode for virtual photographers that lets you visit locales around the world that you may never see otherwise. Places like Stonehenge, Taj Mahal, Mount Everest, European castles, Bora Bora, and more. You can also take general tours of some of the biggest cities on Earth. I was able to tour the Grand Canyon, London, and the Giza pyramids with my feet up and my dog by my side, all rather gorgeously rendered, so long as you don’t look too closely.

Activities mode includes, well, a lot of activities to partake in, including rally races, low flight challenges, landing challenges, and an extremely robust training suite. The low flight stuff is a complete thrill ride allowing you to fly an FA-18 jet as low as you possibly can to rack up as high a score as possible. It’s the closest you’ll get to feeling like you’re Tom Cruise in Top Gun.

If you’re new to flight sims, or coming back after a few decades, I wholeheartedly recommend beginning with the flight training suite. It will take you from the very basics of learning about instrument panels, all the way to flying a Boeing 737 over the course of several hours. In other words, if you hate tutorials, MFS 2024 is not the game for you, regardless of how curious you are. The training taught me enough to be dangerous (in good and bad ways) though it didn’t take long to run into some bugs.

For instance, the glider training appears to be broken at the time of writing, requiring you to reach 167 knots of air speed by nosediving, which causes you to crash and fail. Some training modules also glitched and could not keep up with my progress fast enough, resulting in some failed objectives. Still, I strongly urge you to begin with the training courses, or you’ll want to delete the game before you ever get going, thanks to myriad buttons, switches, and terminology.

I take some issue with the game’s use of AI (or procedurally generated content) as well. Dialogue is cringey all the way around and completely breaks immersion. It is extremely robotic and obviously pieced together by strings of code based on context. 

Along those lines, MFS 2024 features a staggering number of handcrafted airports, glider ports, heliports, oil rigs, and points of interests—totaling in the thousands—but it supplements this (understandably so) with thousands more airports, billions of buildings, and trillions of trees that are all procedurally generated. The issue is that this leads to significant amounts of texture pop-in and the occasional graphical anomaly as you’re flying around, particularly in heavily populated areas. You’ll see half-rendered structures pop up, oftentimes in triplicate, and oftentimes looking severely dilapidated. And though I’ve never been, I’m fairly certain that London doesn’t have trios of dilapidated skyscrapers littered about. Perhaps I’m wrong, but the point is that for a game that generally looks great, this is another breaking point for immersion. Though, to be fair, it is amazing that I can fly from the Eiffel Tower to London Bridge from my chair. And I’m over here complaining about the fake video game buildings next door. Gamers are spoiled, I guess.

So, let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of MFS 2024, and as you might imagine, there are tons of nuts and bolts. As I said, this is one of the most meticulous simulators that I have ever played. From a first-person perspective, you can quite literally interact with every button, switch, lever, knob, and doohickey inside your aircraft. It is both amazingly cool, and staggeringly overwhelming, but it does make me want to play the game in virtual reality real bad. In practicality, manually interacting with dozens (hundreds, on some planes) of switches on a console controller is not feasible. Thankfully, MFS 2024 streamlines sequences and processes to make flying on a controller as easy as possible.

The yoke is controlled with the left joystick, throttle with the X and O buttons, rudders with the triggers, while a combo of shoulder button and d-pad inputs handle a lot of the more finite details, such as adjusting flaps and trim. There is a lot of information, gauges, terminology, and numbers to keep track of and remember, which can vary from aircraft to aircraft. Unfortunately, almost all gauges and instruments are difficult to read on my television screen without zooming in, which in turn makes it difficult to maintain control of my aircraft as a not-so-confident pilot. Thankfully the most important information—altitude, speed, etc.—is more conveniently displayed on the HUD.

MFS 2024 rewards repetition and patience, and though I’m sure it is much easier to learn to fly in a video game, it is clear to me now that I’m not cut out to be a pilot. I’ll be completely honest, the game recommended that I turn on all piloting assistance to learn the game, and I never turned it off. It’s a great way to play, in my opinion, giving you enough to worry about while not making you want to delete the game from your hard drive out of frustration.

With that said, I’m pretty sure you could learn how to fly a real aircraft using MFS 2024 thanks to its granular level of detail. If you’re a true sim psycho, you can even manually plan your flights, right down to doing your own fuel calculations based on passengers, weight, travel distance, and so on. Just know that your mistakes are punished accordingly, and in career mode, for instance, your pilot reputation will fluctuate. So maybe don’t turn your airplane over because you stomped on the rudders too hard trying to park it. Not that I’ve ever done that, but I’m just saying.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is one of the most content-rich and detailed simulators to land on PlayStation 5. There is something for every type of sim fan here, and it’s all packed in a miniscule 28 GBs, though it streams most of its assets from the internet. MFS 2024’s massive scale means it relies on procedural generation that doesn’t always work right, detracting from the experience, in addition to a few bugs that need squashing. If you don’t typically play simulators, or you’ve never played one in your life, this is not the place to start. Despite its best efforts at onboarding newcomers, it is still information overload. But if you know what you’re getting into, being able to see the world (or your own backyard) from the sky is a joy that you may not experience otherwise.