Microsoft Flight: Free to Fly

Few types of games outright intimidate me like flight sims. I mean, I've enjoyed a few flying games, but generally they're in space, or the put a much greater emphasis on ridiculous maneuvers than they do on realistic physics. But Flight is different; Microsoft is taking its most hardcore piece of gaming software out of the hands of a niche audience and giving everyone a chance to play.

That being said, allow me to assuage the longtime fans' fears. Though Microsoft Flight can be played with a keyboard and mouse, it will support all the fancy joysticks, flap pedals and other doo dads that enthusiasts love. Per Microsoft, it also boasts the "most sophisticated" flight model the series has ever had, and you can turn off assists to, in theory, make it as hardcore as they want it to be. Take deep breaths, stay your rage addled fingertips from posting on the Flight forums, and read on to see how much you really have to be mad about.

Flight aims to give the thrill of flying to everyone, including those intimidated by joysticks. For those portions of the audience Flight offers an array of assists to make flying something you can jump right into. You can launch your plane from the ground or just start mid-flight, drop in and start flying without worrying about adjusting instruments, checking flaps or going over an elaborate pre-flight list (though you can still do every single one of these things manually if that's where you get your jollies). The resulting experience puts the emphasis on ease of user experience, with mouse and keyboard controls that work surprisingly well if the demo I saw was any indication.


Flight also brings the "game" aspect of the franchise to the forefront. You have an account profile that levels up much like in Call of Duty or Battlefield or any other number of games these days. For those of us who want clear objectives when we play, you can take on a number of missions and challenges. Challenges are repeatable, giving competitive friends a chance to best one another on the leaderboards, and task you with doing things like flying through rings or landing in various inclement weather conditions. One challenge in particular has a meta-game aspect to it, giving players a hint about the location of a hidden token, then allowing them to use the built in Bing search to try and figure out where it's at.

The search function works because the hints allude to places in the real world, and Flight aims to largely recreate actual places. Sure, not every building or street will be present on Hawaii, for instance, but most notable landmarks are there, and geographically players familiar with the island should be able to navigate based on their experience.

Aside from the control options, what makes Flight an even more of a game for everyone is its price. Microsoft Flight will be supported through various micro-transactions, with the island of Hawaii and the Icon A5 aircraft coming with the free download. Additional planes and land will be purchasable (the first being the rest of the Hawaiian islands), with the hope being that players can pick and choose what they want. I know many of my more hardcore friends will be pretty sore about not being able to fly anywhere they please, but given time and a substantial community the Flight world could develop into an even more elaborate and activity dense world than any Microsoft flight game before it.


If one plane isn't enough to satiate you in the beginning, Microsoft has a plan to lure you into signing in with a Games for Windows Live account. The first time you sign in you get a Boeing Stearman N25, as well as access to additional challenges and multiplayer that supports up to sixteen players. You and your friends don't have to do the same thing, either, giving you the chance to just fly around for fun, or complete objectives on your own while sharing the same space. And of course, signing into Live yields those oh so coveted Achievement Points, which are shared between this and your Xbox account.

If you think you don't have a computer that can run Flight, you might be surprised. Scalability was one of the tenets of the design, and Flight can run on a wide array of hardware. That being said, if you have a more powerful rig, it can actually look quite pretty.


Flight really does look like the best of both worlds for longtime fans and people who, like myself, have looked at the series from afar due to the steep learning curve. If you want to fly around without ever looking at an instrument panel or doing a pre-flight check – if you don't even know what a pre-flight check is – Microsoft Flight has you covered. And if you're the opposite, a person addicted to meticulous details, there's room for you too. Those two parts of the Flight audience might come to play it in vastly different ways, but the team behind it hopes they'll come away with the same thing: an experience that encapsulates the unique joy of flying.

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