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Most helpful customer reviews 352 of 362 people found the following review helpful. A few things seasoned flight simmers will know that new users will certainly WANT to know are: The system requirements to really make this software work well are dauntingly advanced. You'll need something approaching a top-level gaming machine, with a huge video card, to get the full benefit of the entire visual, audible, advanced controls experience. Got a laptop you think is pretty smokin'? Forget it. Microsoft follows every release of this product with massive service packs you must download and install, and each one takes a huge chunk out of your hard drive. Be prepared with LOTS of disk space. This particular release (meaning, the "Gold Edition") includes service packs one and two, so you won't need to download them. An internet connection is required to register the product. A note to real pilots (I am also a pilot): Keep in mind that this is a $30 product for a home computer, not a Flight Safety training machine. The flight model is basic and stable, and is not intended to simulate extreme attitudes and emergency procedures. If you're looking for a realistic spin trainer, or a procedural instrument trainer there are expensive add-ons that will get you CLOSE, but you should generally be looking elsewhere. Bottom line is that this is, hands down, the best of the lot, but you really DO need vast hardware resources to run it. If you own those resources, be prepared for a real-time, audio-visual feast. 89 of 93 people found the following review helpful. 207 of 225 people found the following review helpful. So, overall, I got what I wanted. I was very disappointed that MS decided to dumb down the flight physics even more than in FS9. Lot's of silly things too: For example, the left turning tendency is pronounced in a single engine propellor aircraft. This is caused by Torque, P-Factor, Gyroscopic precession and slipstream. Why do the 2 and 4 engine Commercial Jets in FSX also require heavy right rudder on take-off? They are immune to these forces. (They don't have props!) Stalls are so subtle and gentle as to be pointless, FSX wings never drop and full recovery is possible without relieving back pressure on the stick. FSX Planes will not spin, even when forced into cross-controlled flight. It's impossible to get the spin started and spin recovery; one of the most important basic flight skills to master, is impossible to properly simulate in FSX. Forward slips don't work properly and the glide ratios (at least for 172's) are ridiculously exaggerated (maybe I'm flying really "dirty" planes in real life?). I was also disappointed that there are no physics included to simulate the F-18 breaking the sound barrier. It's great for learning instrumentation and navigation, but as a simulation of flight; it is pretty useless. The things this simulator lets you get away with (Yes, on Full Realism) would kill you several times per day in a real aircraft.
Graphics are good, but not the quantum leap you would expect from FS9-FSX (I'm running a quad core i7 940 at 2.93ghz, 6gb ram and a nVidia GTX-260 and have pretty much everything set to medium. Even set that low, NYC can knock me down to 6 FPS. Buy it for fun, or to experiment with cockpit instumentation (it's really good for that, especially for student pilots training in G-1000 equipped aircraft), but don't fool yourself into believing that it is as Real As It Gets, because it flies like a video game. |
Well-refined leader of the genre
Dumbed down to dumb
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Filed under Software by on Jan 30th, 2012. 
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