Airplane Flight Simulator

Genre: Flight Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

Airplane Flight Simulator (not to be confused with Microsoft’s series of Flight Simulator games) has gone by multiple names. Nintendo’s webpage for the game lists it as Airplane Flight Simulator, the same page’s title lists the game as Flight Sim 2019, and the game’s icon on the Nintendo Switch lists the game simply as Flight Simulator. Released on Nintendo Switch in 2020, it appears to be the same game as the mobile game Airplane Flight Simulator, released in 2018 and also bearing the title Flight Simulator 2018. Needless to say, this is a game with an identity crisis, and I don’t think it’s because the game’s publisher is confused, I think it’s because they want potential buyers to be confused.

Take, for example the screenshots the publisher provided to Nintendo.com. The above image was one I took myself, using my own Nintendo Switch. For comparison’s sake, here’s one of the sample photos listed on Nintendo’s website:

While the two images have different camera angles, are taken at different times of day, and are taken in different locations, hopefully this gives you an idea what to expect. The actual game itself features textures that are far blurrier, and at times they’re worse than what you’d expect to see in a Nintendo 64 game. The lighting isn’t anywhere near as good as their photo indicates, the draw-distance is atrociously bad (there’s tons of pop-in), clouds are uglier, there’s worse aliasing, lower-detail mountains, and while cities do have some decent-looking buildings, don’t expect to find any famous landmarks hanging around. No Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco, no Statue of Liberty in New York City. Heck, the land mass that contains Brooklyn and Queens is entirely bare. Instead, these cities seem to be just copy-pasted blocks of houses and skyscrapers, indistinct and interchangeable.

Look, guys. I know not every game can be up to the standards of Microsoft Flight Simulator, but come on. Even copy-pasting a low-res image from Google Maps would be more effort than this game puts in. It’s like the game’s designers decided what cities to include, and then just asked themselves “hey, this is a city, right? I guess we should have some skyscrapers. Is a few dozen enough? Yeah, New York probably has about a few dozen skyscrapers, that should be good enough.”

Seven thousand. There are over seven thousand skyscrapers in New York City.

Okay, well, maybe it’s because this is running on the Nintendo Switch. Maybe expecting the game to render seven thousand skyscrapers is a bit much. Well, how about… making the ground level the actual ground level? Yeah, at one point in this game, I decided to try to deliberately crash into a mountain, only to find the mountain was illusory and I could fly right through it. It took me a few seconds more to finally crash into the mountain inside that mountain. At another point, I went to make a landing in Atlanta, but the game decided that the ground level was actually about a hundred feet above the actual ground, so I ended up crashing into the sky. Not crashing in the sky, mind you, crashing into the sky. I don’t know if it was done to add insult to injury, but I also note that there were trees growing a hundred feet in the air too, floating up above the buildings. Alls I gotta’ say is wow, Atlanta, you guys have some weird supernatural phenomena going on in your city.

I could go on, talking about how the clouds and lightning seem to have zero effect on your flight other than obscuring your view, but at this point I think you get the idea.

I suppose, before moving on from talking about this game’s atrocious presentation, I should also note that the framerates drop pretty severely at times, and the game even occasionally freezes for a second. But hey, to the game’s credit, it has some fairly decent airline intercom chatter when you need to tell your passengers to buckle their seat belts. So that’s something.

At this point, I’m sure it’s no surprise when I say that the gameplay is terrible too, but the gameplay is terrible too. Turning even the smallest and most maneuverable of planes is a chore, and landing is a crapshoot. Also, this game’s automatic guides are straight-up broken half the time, telling you to go to the airport you just took off from, of directing you to multiple places at once on the runway. At one point, I went to end a mission, only for the game to freeze until I went into the game’s pause menu, unpaused, and then attempted to go to the destination again, only for it to freeze again.

In short, while Airplane Flight Simulator seems to have aspirations to be taken seriously as a low-cost alternative to Microsoft’s critically-acclaimed title, it absolutely fails on every level, it’s ugly, horribly inaccurate, controls poorly, has broken visuals, broken HUD elements, a broken mission system, broken geometry… in fact let’s just say the game overall is broken. Even if you’re an airplane enthusiast, you do not want to get this absolute disaster of a game.

tl;dr – Airplane Flight Simulator (or whatever name it’s going by right now) is a Flight Simulator that fails on every level, with maps that don’t even come close to accurately representing the locations they list, terrible controls, ugly visuals, and numerous elements that are outright broken. This game died in a plane crash, and the corpse is unrecognizable. I doubt even the black box could make sense of what happened here.

Grade: F

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