As a flight simulator fan i came to love FSX, but this did not blinded me towards its flaws.
MISSIONS-as you would expect, flight simulator X doesn't have a story with missions being an exception, which have a self contained plot each, which most of the time are nothing special. For the type of game FSX is, this is not really a flaw. GAMEPLAY-The sim itself now is fairly easy to learn.As a flight simulator fan i came to love FSX, but this did not blinded me towards its flaws.
MISSIONS-as you would expect, flight simulator X doesn't have a story with missions being an exception, which have a self contained plot each, which most of the time are nothing special. For the type of game FSX is, this is not really a flaw. GAMEPLAY-The sim itself now is fairly easy to learn. tutorial missions do a fairly good job on teaching you the basics and some more advanced flight techniques. Missions will gradually get very challenging, and the more advanced missions will require large amounts of effort and lots of trial and error to pull off. fortunately, the save feature allows as many saves as you want and whenever you want, sparing you the frustration. Clickable cockpits are a convinience as memorizing each and every keyboard combination might be time consuming and annoying. However many aircraft are legacy, ported from the previous entry FS2004 and often not all buttons are clickable.
INTERFACE- the interface in the menus is good and it does it's job. The in-game interface on the other hand, is a bit of a chore without a head tracking device, even if you are using a HOTAS joystick. the reason for this is that one monitor cannot fit all the instruments inside it. you will constantly need to turn and zoom the camera to the instruments you need to see and use, forcing you to let the controls of the aircraft. a hat switch on the joystick is a convenient feature, but still you would have to let the controls and grab the mouse in order to use the clickable instruments. final verdict on the interface: you will need at least a decent HOTAS joystick and a second monitor in order, at least partially, alleviate frustration
TECHNICAL- It mostly feels great to fly in the world of flight simulator X. there are lakes, coastlines, big cities and famous landmarks like Eiffel tower and the Parthenon. There are actual cars on the roads(to a point where the technology allows it) and there is also wild life, though sometimes it feels like it's only placed on specific places to enhance missions. unfortunately the technical is where the most drawbacks are. If you take a close look on the ground you will notice randomly placed low-fi textures . beyond that there are the human models which are exclusively used for missions and they are not very good. in missions where you are supposed to have people entering or exiting your aircraft(heli or otherwise) there is no animation of it and you can't see your passengers and crew. The biggest black mark on the game's technical faults is the performance. Constantly poor framerates and stuttering add an immense amount of frustration to the release version. High end computers had a problem running this smoothly many years after release. Even the first patch which improves the performance and fixes bugs was not enough. Εven if you got past the lag and stuttering, the game is very power hungry and it also does not take proper advantage of multicore CPUs, relying on raw CPU power instead. FSX is not that demanding, but poorly optimized. Lowering graphical settings might not only improve performance, but in fact make it worse. Many guides and fan fixes came out for tweaking the game to run proper. FSX Steam edition did some improvements, but not that much. So in addition to the flying gear and extra monitor you would need a very beefed up PC making it more expensive than the price of the individual game. I tried this on 4 CPU. GPUs are out of the equation because FSX does not rely on them much. Initially on an athlon64 at 2.5ghz FSX was playable, but it looked like something out of the 90s. Next up came the E8500. FSX seemed to like the raw power and the 3.4ghz, but it was still problematic. Next came the i5 750 clocked at 2.66ghz. FSX still hates me for that. All these with a standard HDD, that FSX does not enjoy one bit treating you with stutter. Now I changed to a Ryzen 2600x and a Crutial MB500 SSD and FSX loves it, but its technical issues are more apparent now. Though it is an actually smooth experience, the framerate is erratic, jumping up and down. Fortunately this is not obtrusive.
FINAL VERDICT-Despite its major technical flaws that can be overcome with lots effort and tweaking by the user, playing this game can be pure magic. the missions are varied without getting boring and i will add the huge number of third party DLC as an advantage as there is everything for every taste. the physics have only a few hiccups, but generally are excellent. This game is not for everyone. you need high budget gear, and the game itself although more accessible, can be unforgiving later, on more advanced missions. hopefully the new Microsoft Flight Simulator will be a major advancement in solving the performance and accesability issues that plagued this game. MS Flight certainly wasn't.… Expand
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