Microsoft Flight Simulator (MSFS). Best games on Xbox Game Pass in 2024 (Febuary)

This is probably the oldest game series, now over 40 years old. The last installment was released in 2006, so the newest Flight Simulator was sort of a reboot of the iconic IP. The gameplay idea is simple – fly civilian aircraft from point A to point B, with realistic procedures and physics. Asobo, however, added to this formula a real revolution in the form of a map that's covering the entire globe (sic), with like 40 thousand realistic airports (sic).

In addition, all terrains look like the real world, as the simulator uses satellite imagery from Bing map services (and petabytes of data stored in the cloud) streamed on-the-fly only for the current location we're flying in. Thanks to this, in MSFS you can not only admire the most beautiful places in the world and visit historical sites, but also find your own house. And there are dozens of machines to choose from – ranging from small, light avionics to huge passenger planes.

Microsoft Flight Simulator is not a game for everyone, but certainly everyone should at least experience this production, if but for a moment. It's one of the prettiest games you'll see today, and it's also a true benchmark of PC performance. The creators made sure that the complex intricacies of aviation are presented in a simple and accessible way. The number of assistances that can be enabled makes recreational flying manageable for anyone, without a set of expensive joysticks and controllers.

Besides, it's hard to resist the opportunity to travel over your own town and see how the artificial intelligence algorithms recreate it – because it certainly is standing in the right place, and with the accuracy of GPS coordinates. The bitter pill to swallow, however, may be having to download and install over 100 GB of data that the current version of the game requires.

1. Microsoft Flight Simulator in our encyclopedia