Microsoft is no stranger to flight simulation games. I remember sitting down in awe many many years ago to play the first version of Flight Simulator on my then meaty desktop computer and being amazed by the quality of the simulation of flying. Yeah sure, the first few hours involved a lot of ‘failing to avoid the ground’, as Douglas Adams would say, but it was huge fun.

Fast forward to 2012 and lo and behold if it hasn’t popped up again, but with some interesting changes. The first is the name, since it’s now just Microsoft Flight, but the second is more interesting, because the company has made it freeware. That’s right, you can now download the whole whopping 1.4 GB of flight simulation game for free, and start playing immediately.

You’ll still need a powerful computer to get the best out of it, but amazingly it worked on my laptop without a hitch, even though it took an age to load and then all the scenery was turned down to zero resolution. Even so it looked pretty good, and plays nicely. The only annoying thing is the fact that you appear to *have* to go through the training scenarios, which is annoying if you’re a sim vet. One thing to note is you’ll have to pay extra money to get more scenes, challenges, planes etc, so it’s freeware at a limited level. Still, if you like flying, this is a fun toy.