Crazy taxi

London Gatwick Airport is a rare shade of brown, known to neither science nor art. A brown that doesn’t appear on the light spectrum. No easel contains it. It is a dusty brown, a damp brown, a hot and earthy brown that hums with the stinging malodour of disturbed ancient moss where once old forests stood. Descending into Gatwick’s cloying brown from 33,000 feet is like flying under and up Gandalf’s wretched cloak and landing in one of the several horrible little magic pouches he keeps by his balls.

If you’re aware of the previous edition ofMicrosoft Flight Simulator, you’ll already know how Asobo achieves its endlessly impressive, one-to-one recreation of every square inch of the planet. Using cloud streaming magic, the flight simulator continuously blasts several petabytes of Bing Maps data at your unsuspecting internet connection, collapsing the illegal football streams of everyone around you but delivering an uncannily accurate chunk of world to fly around pointing at.

At ground level, and where actual 3D data doesn’t exist, small details like houses and trees and hedgerows are guessed at using aerial photography and dynamically filled in by the constantly churning game engine, so that whatever backwater village pub you were conceived in looks (from a distance at least) as real and as significant as Rome, Tokyo and Paris. Popular landmarks meanwhile, ones that can’t be fudged by procedural generation like the Golden Gate Bridge or the big glass egg where the Mayor of London lives, have been lovingly handmade by the few remaining human visual artists employed by the industry.

Career mode has you working your way up from a wet-eared rookie pilot at an achingly realistic pace. Your first dozen jobs come from other pilots who’ve flown their plane somewhere and left it behind – whether for maintenance or because they partied too hard at one of those infamous pilot galas and had to get the train home – before you eventually graduate to skydiving missions and short passenger runs. Scrape together enough currency and you can take a stab at getting certification for more powerful and more interesting planes and helicopters, which unlock more specialisations and new mission types.

The actual hoisting is triggered by giving a command to your co-pilot with a button press, but the lowering of the rope and the added weight of your injured cargo dangling beneath your chopper all happens in real time and under flight physics, challenging you to keep your whirlybird steady for as long as it takes to pluck someone from the sea. Career missions like these tend to be tests of your foundational flying skills: steady hovering for helicopters, or flat and low-speed flight for dropping skydivers, or smooth and consistent turns near an Arc de Triomphe for sightseers. An extensive series of flight school training sessions equips you with the skills required for each mission type.

Those bandwidth-related problems have largely sorted themselves out, but there are still plenty of more basic problems to contend with. My admittedly remote home airfield is home to an abstract mess of horrifying green obelisks jutting out of the earth like radioactive teeth, making take-off and landing impossible, while even more well-trodden spaces such as Manhattan are often spoiled by rivers melting into nearby structures and smearing ground textures up the sides of buildings.

Passenger dialogue is read aloud by what seems to be text-to-speech software from 1998, giving the constant chatter on missions a hauntingly flat and robotic tone. Sightseers will remark on the awe-inspiring majesty of flying over Knutsford with all the enthusiasm of a Roomba telling you it’s just finished cleaning the bathroom. On one flight, two passengers spoke of a birthday party they had been to at their grandmother’s house far below, their bleak delivery suggesting something truly unspeakable had happened there. Any concerns you might have about AI stealing our jobs will be edged out by unwelcome mental imagery of what grandma potentially did with a cake.

Then there are the even less entertaining bugs. Career mode and certain other activities let you skip time to the next interesting part of the flight, reducing eight hour long hauls to 20 minute jobs, but the transition will sometimes send your plane lurching into a stall or plant it deep underground. Helicopters are essentially off limits if you’re playing on an Xbox controller, the complexities of mapping everything to a couple of analogue sticks and buttons proving too much for even Asobo, who’ve otherwise done a remarkable job of cramming various control surfaces onto the pad’s limited inputs. And passengers will sometimes slide out of their seats and get wedged in the fuselage, which is bad news for them but somehow harmless to your reputation as a pilot.