I really wanted to love the Career Mode in this game—it was the main reason I was excited to buy MSFS—but the overall logic is fundamentally broken. The latest update just made things worse, crashing on me 3 times today alone. Do not buy this if you expect a working aviation business simulator.
Here are the MAIN points I have experienced so far during my 300+hours gameplay. There is more to it, however..
Weird Aircraft Progression & Missing Planes: The fleet choices in Career Mode make absolutely no sense. There are no "in-between" modern regional jets. Where are the promised Embraer jets, the A220, or the Dash-8 for airline service? Instead, they focus on injecting obsolete, 60-year-old planes like the Boeing 707 that nobody uses for modern career transport. Even the ATR is notoriously buggy, and the Cessna Grand Caravan—a plane used daily in real life for passenger island-hopping—is locked out of standard passenger transit in the game.
Broken Dispatch & Impossible Destinations: The mission generator is completely drunk. It will ask you to fly a fully loaded airliner across the ocean with insufficient fuel, or assign you a Honda Jet and demand you land on a 600-meter unpaved dirt strip in the Swiss Alps. It even sends you to defunct military bases in Ethiopia, only to penalize you for landing in the middle of nowhere because the airport doesn't actually exist anymore.
Suicidal ATC & Weather Avoidance: ATC will clear you for take-off with planes sitting on the runway. If there is a massive hurricane, ATC won't vector you around it; they route your Cessna straight into the storm and penalize you for it. Furthermore, you cannot request an alternate airport if your destination is socked in with zero visibility fog.
The Passenger Experience is a Joke: I spent millions on a luxury Longitude, but the game only spawns one lonely passenger. On regional 30-seater flights, the AI cabin crew demands to serve hot food literally 3 minutes before landing, and if you deny it, passenger satisfaction drops. Furthermore, passengers scream and tank your rating if you bank more than 15 degrees—even when it's physically required to line up on short final.
Missing Features & Infinite Alarms: Want to know your V1 or max flap speeds? Good luck, because many cockpits are missing basic placards and manual data. If your autopilot disconnects due to a physics glitch, the master warning alarm gets permanently stuck in an infinite, unsilenceable loop. If you request IFR taxi while the useless AI dispatcher is talking, the radio soft-locks and freezes your controls. My female co-pilot literally speaks with a deep male voice.
No Geopolitical Realism: For a "simulator," it completely ignores real-world airspace closures. You can casually fly VIP charters over active warzones in Ukraine, bypass Russian sanctions, or fly direct from Busan to Pyongyang without a care in the world.
Time Compression = Death: If you try to use the 2x sim rate, the Live Weather system randomly injects freak wind shear or "moon gravity." The autopilot panics, throws the jet into a violent death roll at FL450, and ruins hours of progress for absolutely no reason.
World Generation Bugs & AI Logic: This does not reflect the real-life world. If you fly into regional airports or dirt strips in Florida, the terrain generation is so glitched out that the runways literally look like deep canyons. Meanwhile, you'll be on short final for a massive 13,000-foot runway in Munich, just 10 feet off the ground, and ATC will force you to go around because of broken AI traffic.
It can still be fun, I still like to launch it and fly my planes around, the graphics are surreal, you can see some major cities landmarks, navigate around the Mont Blanc or admire the stars when cruising high at night.
Save your money until they actually finish developing the game and you are expecting a proper simulator from two big companies like Microsoft and Asobo. A shame it takes them almost 2 years to fix things.. 2/5
