Our in-depth Performance Review is currently in the works, but anecdotally I can say that on Series X it’s pretty solid: I ran into a slight framerate hiccup on approach to the Naples' airport, but it was extremely brief and honestly nothing I hadn't experienced before on the PC version. The world is yours to explore, just like in the PC version, with sight-seeing highlights, animal tours, and the entirety of planet Earth streaming from Bing maps. That being said, if you adjust the controls down to their most basic options you can jump into a plane and start exploring the world pretty quickly and easily, and that's what really matters in Microsoft Flight Simulator. But not all is lost: there are existing flight sticks, such as the Thrustmaster T.Flight HOTAS One, that are compatible, and even more Xbox Series X|S flight controllers are planned for future release. Of course, for 95% of people that won't be a problem, but for insufferable nerds seething with uncontrollable dad-energy like me, it's just not the same. This control setup is currently unsupported by the Xbox, so I was forced to use my regular old controller. While the Xbox version automatically carried over all my settings from my PC (including my tail number), my control settings are currently custom-configured for the Thrustmaster TCA Officer Pack control stick and throttle quadrant at full-sim settings. However, I don't think I'll be ditching my PC set-up just yet.
Regardless, it's as gorgeous and awe-inspiring as it is on my PC, maybe even moreso, since I've gone from a 27" 1440p PC monitor to a 55" 4K TV on my Xbox.
In fact, I would venture to guess this is basically just the newly optimized PC update. I'm happy to say Microsoft Flight Simulator on Xbox Series X is almost everything I love about the PC version. I've been playing Flight Simulator since its PC alpha days, and I was skeptical Asobo would be able to pull off a console version. What have you got to lose (other than about 100GB of space)? My favorite game of 2020 is now officially on Xbox Series X/S, and if you're a Game Pass subscriber, you can add it to your console as part of your subscription. Every building is in the right place, aside from a few of the smaller (less than 10x10') outbuildings. My local airport on the east coast of the United States, for example, is tiny and largely unremarkable, but I was impressed by how close to the mark Flight Simulator came while I was taxiing to park my Cessna. That might not seem like a lot of locations, but the remaining 37,000+ of the world’s airports are generated using technology sufficiently advanced that, to my eye, it is indistinguishable from magic. The base version of Microsoft Flight Simulator comes with 20 planes and 30 hand-crafted airports. It might not look exactly like your house, but it's there. If you want to fly over your house, it's there, in Flight Simulator, exactly where it ought to be. Granted, there are a few cracks in the picture-perfect facade in some of the more remote areas, and the buildings outside of major cities are built largely with a clever algorithm instead of by human hands, but it's still absolutely wild how complete it seems. But it's the integration with Microsoft's real-world Bing map services that takes this incredible simulation into a whole new realm of freedom and realism. The attention to detail in the plane interiors, rebuilt virtually using laser scans of the real things, manufacturing documents, and CAD drawings, is astonishingly precise. These are places I will likely never visit again as a civilian, and yet as I gazed out the window during my final descent into places like Jacobabad, Pakistan or Thumrait, Oman, I was seeing an approximation so close to what I remembered from all those years ago that I actually said out loud, "Holy shit, I remember this." It does so much to recreate the feeling of actual flight, at a level of accuracy never before seen, that there were times when I came in for a landing at real-life airfields I'd seen during my time in the Air Force where I was simply stunned. The realism, the depth, the almost limitless replayability – it's like nothing I've ever played before. Microsoft Flight Simulator is the most incredible experience I've ever had on a computer.