X-Plane 8 was very disappointing and I wouldn't recommend you don't waste your money and buy it.
User Rating: 3.2 | X-Plane 8 PC
X-Plane 8 was very disappointing and is a waste of time and money. The game is full of bugs but patches can be downloaded to fix them. A patch comes out maybe once in 1-2 months. It gets annoying to have to download patches to fix the bugs every so often. The game takes about a half hour to install. Once it starts, it takes you right to an airplane at some airport. X-Plane 8 has no main menu and has all of the options to choose from at the top. It's very confusing to work X-Plane 8 without a main menu. Once you quit the game and log back on some time later, it starts you out where you last left off. Lets say you quit when flying a 747 in Arizona. When you load X-Plane back up, you'll be in the same area. After I loaded up the game, I went to O'hare airport in Chicago. When it loaded up, all I saw was tarmac and runway. There are no terminals at ANY airport. There is only tarmac and runway even at the busiest airports. After I took off, I flew towards downtown Chicago to look at the skylines and the Sears Tower. Once I got there, I was angry and upset. Every single building looks exactly alike. No matter if your in New York, Chicago, London or Paris, every building is practically the same. There is no uniqueness to the cities. But fortunately, X-Plane 8 comes with World-Maker, a program used to make your own scenery. But it may take hours or even days to make scenery for a city. It's very hard to make a building look real and may take a few tries to get it right. You can also download scenery for airports and cities off the internet. But without buildings, terminals, and gates, the game gets dull fast. Another problem I noticed was that there were hardly any other aircraft flying around in the game. You can place about 10 other aircraft around you, but they never land. They fly around forever. There is no Air-Traffic Control like FS2002. I haven't figured out how to put aircraft on the ground even though I've been reading the manual for a month. I just wish that there was other AI aircraft like in Flight Simulator. X-Plane 8 comes with about 29 aircraft and more are downloadable online. Personally, I like the supersonic aircraft. You can also make your own aircraft with Plane-Maker, a program that allows you to make your own aircraft or edit the aircraft in the game. But you'd have to be a real plane builder in order to make an aircraft. You have to fill in hundreds of numbers to fix and place engines, wings, tires, gear door, etc etc. It takes hours just to make a plane and it might not even fly that well. Everything has to be perfect or almost to make an aircraft fly. The other programs involved with X-Plane 8 is Airl Foil-Maker, and Brief Maker. X-Plane 8 comes with some features like Air-Drop, where you can be dropped off from another aircraft in the air. You can fly in formation with other aircraft like yours, but it's best with military aircraft. You can put out a forest fire by using your Seaplane, dropping water, then going to a water source to get more. You can be towed off the runway by another aircraft and can be winched off the runway also. You can be refuelled by a KC-10 in the air. You can take off from asphalt, dirt, concrete, grass, and rock runways. You can land and take off from aircraft carriers, frigates, small and large oil rigs and building tops. You can have a IFR or VRL approach to an airport or helipad. You can also fly in space with the Space Shuttle. You can either re-enter the atmosphere and land or start out on Earth and then land at Edwards AFB. But if you choose to start out in space, it takes a long difficult process to fly into the atmosphere and Earth. You start out about 2 or 3 miles above the atmosphere going about 500,000 miles an hour. The slightest movement of the wings or anything else will cause your space shuttle to fly out of control into the atmosphere or into space. You also to be careful how quickly you go into the atmosphere becuase you might burn up. So it's pretty hard to fly the Space Shuttle. If you get bored of Earth, you can change and fly on Mars. Although it sounds fun, it's quite difficult becuase you ahve to get used to haveing no gravity. You have to fly the Mars Jet or Mars Rocket in order to get off the ground on Mars. There are not many airports on Mars and flying to one may take hours even though you may be going fast. The Mars Planes can also go out of control with the slightest movements. So I just stay on earth. These features make the game fun, but they get old quickly. You can fail about 35 systems manually or automatically. But the games needs to improve alot more on graphics and scenery because the ground looks the same no matter if your five feet in the air or 50,000 feet in the air. So overall I'd give this a bad score. Save your money for a better flight sim game and try to stay away from all X-Plane products. If you have any questions on X-Plane 8 or any problems with this review, PM me. X-Plane 8 is very disappointing and the graphics overall are not good. 
