Another great installment, but there is something missing.
The gameplay is great as usual, a descent selection of aircraft that come with the release, and countless amounts of airports/runways/strips to take off and land from. This is a given from the MS flight series, but they still manage to find some more. The best addition is the missions of course! I like this new addition to give many casual flight simmers a chance on some challenges ranging from easy to expert, flying a Piper on a short flight, to flight testing a restored 747. Many little things, like having a co-pilot or some other voice interactions along with the missions, keep you from giving up on some longer ones.
The graphics are great, just great. They took a giant leap from FS9 in terms of the land detail. No more jagged shorelines, reflective water, ground detail and textures, and of course the planes have been stepped up beautifully. Vehicles, boats, and airport utility vehicles have been added also, which just adds to the realism of coming in for a landing, and passing over a highway full of cars, then to taxi to your ramp and watch the airport vehicles go to work. I can't wait to see it in DX10, would sure be a sight to see.
Sounds are great as usual. I don't see much of a change from FS9, though the aircraft now seem to have their independent engine sounds, where as in FS9, alot of the airliners had the same engine sounds all around. Now comes some of the hardships of the game..which seem to doom a lot of us players. From what I have research and experienced first hand, then game has no support for SLi systems, which extremely bombs the frame rates of the game. Even with my system specs, I have no chance of flying through certain dense areas of the game, cities. Even with the auto-gen turned down to sparse, I can barely get out of the teens in frame rates. But flying many of the missions seems to be no problem, smooth rates on missions that are out in nature.
The game also seems to not take advantage of dual core CPU's either. As I watch my system monitor, one CPU takes the full load, and the second never even thinks about stepping up to lend a hand, which is a big letdown.
I have to say this game is great, even with some of the speed bumps that comes with a game that is more meant for the systems of next year, running Vista and using DX10 technology. The game is going to be a lot better on there. I still find myself playing even with all this, does not seem to bother me much, but it just leaves something there to be desired; Microsoft could have put a little more effort into the game to work smoother on the current windows platform, and DX9 cards.