Just like its predecessor, with the entirety of planet Earth available to explore, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has a whole lot to do. 2020’s Microsoft Flight Simulator was the first (and, so far, only) 10 I’ve given in a review, and the enormity of the options available in this year’s follow-up have only been tempered by the lingering problems that accompany them. Because codes weren’t available early and unexpected turbulence at takeoff made it literally impossible to play for the first 24 hours, I’m still working on my up and coming aviation career, as well as this review. For now, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 has some extraordinary features to set it apart, but its impact is also falling short of how blown away I was by the last edition, and I really wanted to be blown away. Instead, I’m “merely” impressed.

Right off the rip, the biggest new addition to Flight Simulator 2024 is its career mode. You pick a starting airport as your home base, get hired by a fictional aviation company, and begin progressing through your career as a pilot. It all plays out like a traditional video game skill tree: after you master the beginner missions, you open up new options, and completing them opens up further opportunities still. So you can get a tail wheel endorsement, for example, after you complete the requirements for a commercial pilots license, which then opens up options for newer planes and jobs like search and rescue, or you can get certified in rotor craft (helicopters) which leads to stuff like operating a sky crane. Which, to me personally, elicits a “hell yeah.” Each new certification or endorsement also opens up different jobs you can pick from, ranging from simple stuff like flightseeing, to more complex operations like, well, anything to do with the helicopters, basically.

Eventually you earn enough money and reputation to throw off the bonds of your employment and start your own aviation company. I haven’t gotten that far yet, but I am moving along with my fixed wing endorsements at a pretty good pace. To what end, I haven’t yet decided, but I’m looking forward to opening my own company and taking the lion’s share of the profits. Those profits are used to further grow your business, and I can’t wait until I can afford my own fleet of aircraft.

The first few missions in career mode are just basic flight training, meant to familiarize you with the ins and outs of flying a plane. What I found disappointing is that the flight training is pretty much identical to the tutorials from 2020. All the training missions take place at the same airfield in Sedona, Arizona as 2020 and the actual tasks are exactly the same. The only real difference is that the AI-generated instruction and on-screen advice is a little more clear about what’s expected of you in any given mission. I do appreciate the default tooltips in 2024 because there are about a million different buttons that do a million different things, and I used to have to go to Google whenever I’d forget how to release my parking brake. (I don’t even think I’ll end up turning them off like I did in 2020, just because I’m a forgetful fellow.)

After the initial training missions, you do a few flights to get enough hours in to test for your commercial pilot’s license. Taking the tests costs in-game currency, but you only need to pay for it once and you can retake it as many times as you need. You also need to have enough experience and do well enough in the training missions – but if you are already an experienced pilot, you can just jump right into the test and skip the lessons.

The further along you get, the more missions and mission types open up. What I thought was a little strange, however, was that they don’t all open up near your home airport. I picked a small airfield in the deepest parts of eastern Maine, KMVM Machias Valley Airfield, but after my initial missions, I was being sent to Europe to complete aircraft delivery and skydive missions. It’s not something that bothers me too much, but it did come across as odd, which pulled me out of the “career” illusion I had built up for myself. Lousy imagination!

Otherwise, I’m actually really loving career mode. In 2020’s iteration, I would make-up little missions for myself, like delivering pizza by air from Knox County Regional Airport in Owl’s Head, Maine to the remote Matinicus Island 20 miles off the coast (a real thing that happens, by the way). Having structured reasons to better familiarize myself with the aircraft and patterns in the sky is going to keep me on course, so to speak, and stealthily make me into a better sim-pilot. So far it’s my favorite part of Flight Simulator 2024 and I’m looking forward to starting either my own airline or a helicopter sky crane company. Or both! I’ve got time.

Another new addition is the challenge league. This mode is the most game-y of them all, but retains all the simulation flight models and physics I love. There are three challenges each week, as well as leaderboards, which I am a huge fan of because I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed.

Of the three available in the first round, my favorite is the F/A-18 rally race through the Grand Canyon. You fly Maverick’s modern jet of choice through a section of the canyon, slaloming gates in a hunt for pure speed. Since it’s still the same flight model under the hood, that’s not as easy as it seems – but holy crap is it fun as hell. It took me a lot of tries to get to my final score of around 1 minute 54 seconds, and that’s not even a good score: it only put me in the Bronze league. But the satisfaction of seeing my time raised up above the Xbox Live Gamertag of someone who I don’t know at all, but is unknowingly my arch-nemesis, is great. I’m looking forward to revisiting the challenges each week. The previous Flight Simulator had landing challenges with leaderboards, too, but as fun as those were, they didn’t quite hit the dynamism of flying a fighter jet through one of the world’s seven natural wonders.

Take Your Pic

One of the things I liked the most about the last Flight Simulator was how it let me visit places I’d either never been before or would almost certainly never visit again. In Flight Simulator 2024, sightseeing has been placed front and center in the photo challenges mode. You visit famous landmarks and places around the world and take photos of them. The type and criteria of the photos changes with each landmark. For example, in the first photo challenge, you need to take a picture of the Great Sphinx while the sun is above its right shoulder on the equinox. Oh, and you need to do it on foot.

And that’s one of the biggest and coolest new features: you can land, get out of your plane, and walk around. However, it’s not quite as elegant as I had hoped it would be. First of all, your walking speed is paced realistically, just like the rest of the simulator, (who would have guessed?) so if you’ve been playing first-person video games all your life, walking at an actual human’s pace feels almost painfully slow. Secondly, the level of detail is going to depend on a whole bunch of different factors, like the power of your PC, the strength of your internet connection, and the health of the cloud servers, so your mileage can (and probably will) vary.

Still, in spite of some weirdly GoldenEye-esque objects around the Great Pyramid complex, the up-close terrain itself is really detailed. The sand and desert rocks look incredibly realistic, and the ground in general now seems to look more like how ground is actually supposed to look around the world. If you taxi through tall grass at the end of a rural runway, for example, the tracks from your wheels remain even when you return later. Same thing with snow or mud. Mud will even stick to your wheels and supposedly have an effect on your aerodynamics, although I can’t speak to how true that is on account of never having flown an actual plane with mud-caked tires.

There are also way more animals now. Instead of static points on a map telling you “there is a giraffe here,” animals now pop up in the places you’d expect them to be. I very much felt like I was actually at an airfield in Maine when a bull moose plodded its way across the airstrip as I held short of the active runway. I haven’t seen any other animals myself, but I know they’re there because Flight Simulator 2024 uses an open-source database of animal locations to put them where they’re supposed to be – so with some luck, I can go to Africa and see some lions before long.

And when you lift your head up from the ground, Flight Simulator 2024 can look much better than its predecessor across the board (with an emphasis on can). The improvement is especially stark in a place like the Grand Canyon, which I visited many times in 2020’s Flight Simulator. Whereas before it looked very obviously like a smooth, texture-mapped computer model up close, now it looks amazingly like the real thing. I am currently running Flight Simulator 2024 on a pretty beastly PC: it has an i9-13900K processor, a Radeon RX 7900XT GPU, and 64GBs of DDR5 RAM (disclosure, the RAM was provided by Corsair). With that setup, this year’s Flight Simulator looks and runs way better. Mostly.

The problem comes from the fact Flight Simulator 2024 is streamed from the cloud, and so far they haven’t ironed out all the issues. In career mode, I did a flightseeing mission around Venice, Italy, and St. Mark’s Basilica was a purple-checkered polygonal model with no textures whatsoever, while the rest of Venice was rendered in perfect detail. I honestly would rather have something like the world map packs of 2020’s Flight Simulator living on my SSD and only stream the boring parts. Right now, though, there’s no way to do that, and the reliance on cloud streaming was something the Flight Simulator team really hammered on the importance of leading up to launch, so I’d be surprised if they switched to some kind of hybrid model at this point.

And in spite of everything looking really good on my beastly PC, it’s worth noting that my GPU is running at 100% capacity at the recommended settings in order to make that happen. When I turned the graphics down to the next lower preset, it only brought GPU usage down to 98%. That ain’t good.

Current Thoughts

In spite of what can reasonably be described as a catastrophic launch, I’m already pretty much in love with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 – I’m just not blown away like I was five years ago, when I first found myself faced with the opportunity to fly to literally any place on Earth. That option remains, of course, and it’s been vastly improved by some smart new features, but it doesn’t have that same impact, either. As we move away from the rocky launch, I’m encountering fewer and fewer issues, which gives me the chance to focus on what I love about Flight Simulator. Usually that’s flying around aimlessly, but this time career mode is also giving me real reasons to take off, as well as a better understanding of the world of commercial aviation. I’m going to keep at it before I render my final verdict, but right now, in spite of its initial problems, I think Flight Simulator 2024 is pretty damn great, even if it hasn’t caught the lightning in a bottle that was the last Flight Simulator once again.

Zynga has announced plans to bring Star Wars: Hunters to PC via Steam Early Access in 2025.

Star Wars: Hunters is a free-to-download team-based battle arena game that launched on Nintendo Switch and iOS and Android in June. IGN’s Star Wars: Hunters review returned a 7/10. We said: “Star Wars: Hunters’ lighthearted PvP fun is like a party at the Death Star: Impressive for a bit, but probably not a place you’ll want to hang around for too long.”

Take-Two-owned Zynga is best known for mobile games FarmVille, Words with Friends, and CSR Racing, but with Star Wars: Hunters it branched out to console for the first time. Similarly, Star Wars: Hunters, developed by its development studio NaturalMotion, is the first Zynga-published game to launch on PC.

The PC build features higher resolution textures and shadows, higher rendering quality, and a high detail PC layer in select battlefields, zynga said. Keyboard, mouse, and wireless controller support will be added and players can also utilize keybinding.

“The success of Star Wars: Hunters on mobile and Nintendo Switch devices has led to our decision to expand the game to PC,” commented Yaron Leyvan, executive vice president, games, at Zynga. “This is something our community of fans have been asking for and we are very excited to welcome even more players to Vespaara. This moment also marks a milestone for Zynga as we bring one of our games to PC for the first time.”

Zynga’s note to press fails to mention Star Wars: Hunters coming to other consoles, such as the Xbox Series X and S and the PlayStation 5. Players can get an early look and help test the PC version by signing up for the upcoming closed beta. Expect more details soon.

It’s a busy time in the world of Star Wars video games, with a number of high-profile projects in the works. Respawn’s Star Wars Jedi 3, Quantic Dream’s Star Wars Eclipse, and Amy Hennig’s untitled Star Wars game are just three due out in the coming years.

Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.

Steam’s Early Access recently got a new addition: Guidus Zero, a top-down dungeon crawling roguelike developed by indie South Korean studio Izzle.

The story takes place in a world where a war raged for ages without a clear victor. After it ended, the central continent was declared a neutral zone. A massive sinkhole called The Scar opened on that continent, and from its depths comes a mysterious substance known as Black Blood that spawns corrupted beings. It’s unknown how this sinkhole came to be, where the Black Blood is coming from, or what waits in the deepest regions of The Scar. That’s where you come in.

You’ll join a cast of characters in The Scar, traveling deeper and deeper beneath the surface while facing all manner of enemies that have been corrupted by the Black Blood. You’ll have several different controllable characters to choose from, each with their own strengths and abilities. There’s real-time action combat with a bit of a twist: You and your enemies move between tiles on a grid in which you can only navigate in the four cardinal directions.

When an enemy is about to attack, an exclamation mark will appear above their head and the ground will be highlighted showing where their attack will land. Different enemies have different attack patterns — some strike directly in front of them, some hit a long line, and others target a larger area of the grid. You’ll face several enemies at a time, forcing you to stay on your toes and react quickly to dodge attacks.

While moving, you can roll to make yourself invincible, but each roll consumes stamina. And since you can’t move diagonally, you’ll need to be strategic about which direction you move and how often you roll. You don’t want to end up trapped between attacks you can’t avoid.

Combat isn’t all about avoiding damage, though. You need to be able to dish it out too, but how you do that changes depending on what character you pick. Before each run, you’ll choose a character and their starting trait. In classic RPG fashion, killing enemies gains experience, which makes you level up.

As you level up, you’ll unlock choices for skill upgrades that are unique to the trait you picked at the start of the run. These will define the playstyle of that run, so even if you play the same character, runs can play differently depending on the starting trait and upgrades you pick. Your levels and progression selections are exclusive to that run, so when you die, they’ll all reset.

Not everything will reset, though. During the course of a run, you’ll come across ore veins you can break to obtain stones, which have their own stats. All the stones in your bag will add together, and reaching certain stat thresholds will give your character buffs. You can equip stones in available slots, which will preserve them even after your run ends. Any unequipped stones in your bag when your run ends will be converted into stone fragments, which can serve as currency or be reforged into new stones by an NPC blacksmith.

During each run, you can also discover special rooms with treasure chests where you can find artifacts. They grant unique buffs and improve your abilities, and over time can build up stacks of elemental effects. If an artifact reaches five stacks, it becomes bonded with a spirit that corresponds to that element and allows you to use unique elemental attacks and effects.

Becoming bonded to Ignis, the fire spirit, gives you access to a burn debuff that deals continuous damage. Atlen, the water spirit, slows enemies and freezes those with a wet debuff. Rathorus, the lightning spirit, inflicts a shock debuff that deals additional damage. Enryl, the wind spirit, increases your movement speed and enhances multi-hits with a sprint buff. Terrania, the earth spirit, inflicts a petrify debuff that causes fragments to shoot out when you attack petrified enemies.

This all adds up to a roguelike with a classic “one more run” feeling. Stones provide permanent growth, while your choices for character, starting trait, and ability upgrades make every run different. If you’re interested in checking out Guidus Zero, it’s available now in Early Access on Steam.

They’re celebrating launch by offering a 10% discount that will last until Dec. 9. Guidus Zero is also considering future releases for Xbox and Nintendo Switch, but a console release has not been officially announced.