Thank you Laminar Research for sending us this simulator to review!

I have long eyed flight simulators, but never really gave them the time they deserved until recently. I was familiar with X-Plane before being offered the chance to review this, as my day job is a Linux admin, and one of my coworkers of nearly a decade who only runs Linux at home told me about how he runs X-Plane 11 on his Linux-based flight simulator rig. So, with a review sample of the Turtle Beach VelocityOne Flightstick in hand, this was the perfect time to dive right into X-Plane!

X-Plane has been around for nearly thirty years now, and claims to be the most realistic flight simulator. At first I thought it was just marketing, but after doing some research, there just might be something to this claim.

Laminar Research has taken a unique approach compared to other simulators. X-Plane uses a physics model called 'blade element theory'. The way it works is to divide up each part of the plane, say a wing, and chop it up into fragments. These fragments are given a value of lift and drag. Then all of the different fragments are added up and put together, after which the final aerodynamic model of the aircraft is computed. It has been proven that this method, once applied to every part, will lead to a model that flies nearly identically to the real aircraft.

Taken to the next level, this flight model means that one should theoretically be able to take pieces of any aircraft and put them together with another, to see how it flies. And that's exactly what X-Plane 12 allows you to do! This isn't just a flight simulator, but it also includes a whole bunch of tools you can use to make your own aircraft. If that wasn't enough, these tools are so good that real-life aircraft has been developed from the ground up using X-Plane, then manufactured to those specifications after proving that they can fly.

The way X-Plane handles building is to combine airfoils, which is basically a modeled cross section of a wing, and combine that with various other pieces, sometimes premodeled and sometimes custom, and put them together. You can also customize engines and so on, to make the final aircraft. Now I make this sound simple - it's not. There is a ton of customization available, and plenty of documentation to help you figure it out. There are lots of pieces, lots of numbers to customize everything, and more; there's a lot there. Fortunately, if you aren't an aspiring airplane designer, there are entire communities dedicated to planes you can download. If that wasn't enough, you can even manually copy over aircraft from previous versions, like X-Plane 11. I don't know if it's just my review code or a feature of all purchases directly from x-plane.com, but I was able to use my 12 code on 11 as well, and I was then able to copy the files from one of my favorite planes, the SR-71 Blackbird, and put it in X-Plane 12's Aircraft directory and fly it in X-Plane 12.

Of course custom planes are not all you can do. There is also a World Editor, which is a separate free (and open source!) download from their web site. In X-Plane, world maps and textures are not based purely off of satellite data, but are hand modeled in many cases. For example, major airports and cities like Chicago, Dubai, London, and Los Angeles were custom modeled by X-Plane developers. However, if you fly past where they modeled it, you are likely to find a bunch of less exciting stock textures. On the plus side, I was able to find the tiny airport not far from my house and fly from there!

One positive side to X-Plane's approach to world geography is that you can actually download the whole world onto your computer and have it take up less than one hundred gigabytes. Some competitors who use satellite data have data sets that exceed many disk drives and instead require an internet connection, because they have to stream where you fly from the internet. While it can be a great way to do it, there are definite benefits to the locally installed model, like being able to fly even if the internet is down, or if the servers hosting the world maps are shut down.

While every flight simulator, X-Plane 12 included, has a bunch of airplanes to choose from, these planes are not only modeled for their flight as mentioned before, but they have interiors. You can fully explore most of the flight deck if it has one, and the cockpits are quite impressive. Each button, knob, lever, or stick can be moved in real time, and it will impact the flight appropriately. You can even program the flight computer if you want to set a course. Sadly the ejector seat does nothing, but so much does, that it was really awesome to play around with. You can just point at something with your mouse to interact with it.

Speaking of interact, X-Plane 12 has a Virtual Reality (VR) mode, and it's absolutely incredible. Now, it must be said that the system requirements are sky high - I had to lower the rendering resolution by at least half to get anything close to playable frame rates, even on my fairly high-end RTX 3080 GPU. But it's difficult to surpass the experience of sitting in the cockpit, pushing the throttle with your hand, pulling the brake disengage lever, and moving your hand to the in-plane stick or yoke and just grabbing it. It's amazing! That, and your mind plays tricks on you while going up and down. It's an incredible experience, and if you think this sounds neat, well it definitely is. Here's a video of me streaming that experience, along with some dedicated viewers on Twitch:

If you don't have a full VR setup, I highly recommend you at least grab a flightstick or flight yoke, as it's far more natural to fly that way. I sincerely hope I get an opportunity to try this game with rudder pedals in the future. I'm convinced that would make this experience even better, as managing the rudder is a really important aspect of flying, and would be much easier with those pedals. Either way, dealing with throttle, flaps, trim, and more with joystick buttons and sliders is a lot more immersive than using the mouse and keyboard to do everything.

The first time I played X-Plane 12 I just jumped right in, and while I'm glad the game lets you do that, I wish I would have tried taking part in the flight school first. This is a training mode that really helps you understand not only how to do things like take off and land, but also why your plane constantly pulls to the left (for example). This is not a bug, but something real-life propeller planes do! I didn't understand this until I completed that training. I also discovered that I am not good at flying helicopters. Those things are tough!

Speaking of helicopters, this game includes a few unique aircraft to fly if you wish. I enjoy the ultralight offered, because it's just you and the sky, with little in your way. But the really interesting aircraft is the VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) plane that they let you fly. This is a case where they modeled a not-yet real aircraft, and put it in the simulator before the real thing exists. It's also all electric, for those interested in that. So you can see how moving around works, when you have blades on top lifting you off the ground, and also a propeller in the rear pushing you forward. It's pretty neat that you can fly what doesn't exist yet - but could.

I've said a lot of nice things about X-Plane 12, and overall I really enjoyed my time with it. But I must say that I did run into some bugs. In particular, my first time attempting to stream, it crashed repeatedly to the desktop. I seem to have figured that out; well I updated to the latest beta, as well as did some other system tweaks on my high-end gaming desktop. While I'm not sure which one thing did it, I was able to enjoy flying since without too many problems, and the VR stream didn't crash at all.

As I mentioned before, the maps and world geometry is all stored locally. Because of this and other reasons, graphically, X-Plane 12 looks decent overall, but it's not in the same league as Microsoft's absolutely stunning Flight Simulator 2020. I don't own that game, so I couldn't compare the two directly side-by-side, but from memory and screenshots, it's absolutely stunning. X-Plane 12 looks nice, but not that nice. But Microsoft's product achieves this by downloading all map data in real time from their Azure Cloud platform, as the map data downloaded locally would take up at least a terabyte of disk space. If you want to be able to play a flight sim without a stable internet connection, X-Plane is a much better choice.

While the graphics are not amazing when modeling the Earth, the lighting is good, and aircraft looks fantastic. Sound effects are meant to model a real plane, though of course without the deafening volume of a real plane (unless you turn it up!). Flight controls can use virtually anything connected to your computer; your mouse and keyboard, joysticks, pedals, throttles, or whatever else you can think of.

If that wasn't enough, for advanced users and developers, there is plenty for you, too. Multiplayer is possible, though one user (and account; one account per computer) has to be a server and the others have to connect to the server. There are APIs that developers can connect to, and flight instructors can also trigger engine failures and other issues through some of these APIs. You can also connect multiple computers together for the same aircraft or different ones, depending on what you want to achieve. The possibilities X-Plane affords you are nearly endless, as mods exist which can do all kinds of things. Most mods can be found on x-plane.org, but that is not the only place to find them.

X-Plane 12 is a very impressive flight simulator. I am definitely new to this genre, so I can't rely on years of experience to compare this with others. But what I can say is that X-Plane is so highly regarded in the flight simulator universe that there are professional versions of the software (with expensive hardware that you need to purchase as well) which allows you to log flight hours with the FAA that can be used towards a pilot's license. According to Laminar Research, the software included in the home version is essentially identical to the professional version, just with stricter hardware requirements (and some fun features removed) that the FAA needs. If you are looking for something to simulate real flight as accurately as you can get, X-Plane 12 is a great choice. This is definitely a case where the more you put into it (time, hardware, etc.) the more you can get out of the experience. If you ever get a chance to check this out in VR take it - it's incredible!