There are so many switches and dials in the cockpit that there’s no knowing what to hit without studying the huge flight manual in detail. You are prompted with a few guidelines at how to get rolling (such as “hit spacebar to release the breaks”) although you’re not told how to start the engines. I spent the best part of 10 minutes just sat on the runway trying to work out how to start the engines whilst Air Traffic Control went crazy at me. X-Plane's controls are incredibly complex to mirror a real commercial airliner. The biggest problem you’ll have is working out how on earth to get started. The graphics are vector based so they’re not exactly brilliant but they’re what you’d expect from a simulator. X-Plane naturally features the whole range of weather conditions you might face and the plane reacts realistically to them. You can even test your mettle on aircraft carriers, helipads, frigates that pitch and roll in the waves, and oil rigs. You can pretty much fly to any location around the world and choose from over 18,000 airports to test your landing and take-off skills. There’s even a plane builder option which allows you to build your own model. In all, about 40 aircraft spanning the aviation industry (and history) with several hundred more which can be freely downloaded from the internet. It also offers subsonic and supersonic flight dynamics, sporting aircraft from the Bell 206 Jet-Ranger helicopter and Cessna 172 light plane to the supersonic Concorde and Mach-3 XB-70 Valkyrie.

In this X-Plane demo, you are limited to just one aircraft and five minutes of flight but in the full version, you can take control of props, jets, single- and multi-engine airplanes, as well as gliders, helicopters and VTOLs such as the V-22 Osprey and AV8-B Harrier.

Depending on your bandwidth, you will be looking at hours, if not days to download the whole thing. All those scenarios, vectored graphics and flight controls take up a lot of hardrive space. Once you’ve installed that, a very swanky download dialogue opens to download the other 1.3 gigabytes of the game. Don’t be fooled by the 1.8MB file size in the game description – that’s just the installer.

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