Silicon Fusion >> Reviews >> Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 : A Century of Flight

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Review:

30th July 2003:
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 : A Century of Flight
A game about planes. The best flying game money can buy, but does that make it good?
Posted by Peter Cavan - PC - UK and Europe

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, or FS2004, is a game in which the player controls an aircraft.

Well, great, how many enemy-ridden cities can I bomb?
None.
At least there are cannons for air-to-air fighting?
Nope.
That's all right; at least there are big explosions when you crash?
Definitely not.
What can I do then?
You fly.

That pretty much sums up FS2004. No guns, no bombs, no Nazis, no explosions, no timers, not even any lovely air stewardesses; just a whole lot of plane (and helicopter) flying. Is that a good thing? Well, it depends what you like. A Century Of Flight is there because you get to fly planes from many different eras of the 20th century.

The only people who will be immediately at ease with this game are FS2002 players, and pilots. This game goes into so much detail that some pilots use it to practice. There are instruction manuals that are modified versions of the real aircraft's. That's just an example of the sort of lengths the team at Microsoft go to in order to keep this title realistic. By the way, the game has over 24,000 airports, if you want to land at them all!

And if this game is nothing else, it is realistic. There are 23 planes on offer and 2 helicopters., most with different paint jobs available. From the Wright Brothers' craft to the Boeing 747-400 (The Jumbo Jet), from the Learjet 45 to the Douglas DC-3, everybody can fly his or her favourite plane. You play most of this title from the perspective of the pilot, so you can see the controls and out the front window. Each control panel has been modelled on the real thing; this is one of the reasons that real pilots find it so useful. There are some adjustments, like a 1930s plane with GPS satellite navigation, but these are small differences. In this game there is also an encyclopaedia that teaches you all about the planes on offer.

Actually controlling the plane gets more complicated the newer the model, but some basics stay the same. Your main dials are airspeed (how fast you are going), the artificial horizon (for seeing where the horizon is in bad weather), and altitude (how high you are). Using these three dials is enough to fly the plane reasonably well, but many will look to the rest of the controls for a more technical flight. Most of the rest of your time will be spent in the little icons placed somewhere on the panel. These open things like : GPS, the radio, a map, throttle control, a clock, a compass. GPS is simple enough, it shows where your plane is, what heading you are on, what is nearby etc. The map shows you where you are, like the GPS, but allows you to zoom in and out, to see things like what direction a runway goes, or to see your whole route. The map also allows you to turn your plane just by changing the heading; this useful for when you are going in the wrong direction and need to do a 180-degree turn. The compass and the clock are pretty self-explanatory.

The radio allows you to talk to the control tower and airport ground staff, and is actually quite a big part of using the plane. For example, in order to take off, you will need to radio the ground staff to ask for a taxi route to the runway, then radio the control tower for take-off clearance. This is all done through presses of numbers that correspond to commands in the radio menu.

If you play this game for any amount of time you will be seeing a lot of the throttle control. This allows you to control engines' speeds individually (if you have more than 1 engine), to turn off your engines, and to extend your flaps for landing. In some cases the controls for the landing gear are also here.

Once you have got to grips with all of the controls, the flying itself is relatively simple. I would certainly advise anyone who bought this title to invest in a joystick as well. Not only does the joystick make the game more realistic, it means controlling the plane is much easier. You can go up and down (pitch), and go left or right by rolling slightly to that side. One of the first things that you have to learn about flying these planes is to do everything gently. You can't turn the plane like a car, it will just barrel roll. If you try to climb too high you will stall, so care must be taken.

You fly from airport to airport, but the problem is that there is nothing to break this up. Once you have taken-off, flown around a bit, and landed, you have seen most of what this game has to offer. Sure, you can do that in lots of different aircraft and helicopters, but the experience stays similar. There is obviously a difference in flying a 150mph plane and a 700mph one, but although there are ???? planes, after one of each category (jet, helicopter etc), they feel very samey. People might argue that the game wouldn't be realistic if every plane felt very different, but it would make for a better replay value. Also, when you crash, the plane just stops, no explosion. I know this might be wise after the September 11th attacks, but does mean that the game loses some of its realistic value. Jet aircraft that go into the ground vertically down at over 800mph do not just stop and sit there, unharmed. You can turn damage off, this means that instead off just stopping, a plane that has hit the ground will bounce off.

There are missions thrown in, but they don't seem very useful. The missions are usually 'fly from A to B' repackaged, and as you don't do anything when you get to an airport, they feel pointless. The missions that are historic, like the first trans-Atlantic flight, are better, but not much. Once you get to an airport all you can do is park or take off again, you can't pick up passengers or let others off. This means that FS2004 is certainly a flying simulator, not a pilot simulator. Seeing as you can even open the doors this seems like a wasted opportunity, it couldn't be that hard to add passengers into this game.

Maybe I'm being too harsh, if the first 2 hrs don't bore you this title has much to offer. Even though the missions may be a bit pointless there are lots of them, one even takes 12hrs to complete. The distances are all real, so London to Malaga actually takes 3 hrs to fly, not 3 minutes. This does make the game long, but rather artificially. There are more planes than most people would ever use, which certainly varies the proceedings. There are lots of tutorials to help everybody learn how to fly, with movies and voice-overs from real instructors.

The graphics in this game are truly excellent, you can see for scores of miles in every direction. And some parts of the world have been accurately modelled (Grand Canyon, The Himalayas etc). You will need a good PC to get the full experience, but as most of the options are scaleable, you can scrape by with a relatively slow PC at the expense of draw distances and picture quality. Cities are full of houses, which while not being much to look at give you a felling of actually being there, landing in New York or wherever it is. Other planes are detailed once you get close, and if you know a bit about planes you will recognise a lot. Airports are busy or quiet depending on what you decided on the settings screen, and busy airports can be interesting. As with everything in this title, the audio is realistic, the sound of the engines roar and the flaps moving are all beautifully done. There are about 10 voices to choose from for radio conversations, so this means that you can personalise your experience. You can create a flight, which allows you to choose a plane and change things like the amount of fuel and the paint job. The weather can be chosen or set to change, from clear skies to blizzards and storms.

Overall, this is a hard title to mark. For some people it will be the game of the year, they will sit for hours at their screens, living in a world of ATCs and VOR to VOR routes. It even teaches you quite a bit about aviation history. But other people will think it the most boring, pointless game ever made, and abandon it for the likes of IL2 : Forgotten Battles and even Crimson Skies. This is by no means a bad game; you can see all the work that has gone into it by a dedicated team. For most people it will be cool to fly a Jumbo, and to do things they will never get to do for real, but after about an hour that excitement wears off and you begin to see how little there is to keep your average gamer coming back. For people who love planes this is the Holy Grail, but just average for the rest of us.

Peter Cavan

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Review Summary:

As a flying game this rules the roost, with nearly no competition and brilliant realism. It could be used to train pilots with its beautiful graphics and the planes on offer, but that doesn't immediately make it a game the general public will want to play. Great for some, not so good for others.

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