I'm deeply shocked by how rough the FS community is man-handling this innocent $15 game.

I'm a 15+ year FS veteran, FS9, FSX, P3D, the latest, the greatest, addons, OC'd PCs and tweaked configs til the cows come home, I've done it all. But even coming from that background, spending an average of $250-1000 annually for addons, accersories and peripherals, watching an waiting with bated breath for over a decade for a true successor to pick up the mantle of flagship Flight Simulators... yet EVEN I CAN FIND SOMETHING NICE TO SAY ABOUT DTG Flight School.

I have to congratulate the hard working developers for picking up the torch and running the brutal gauntlet that the flight simming community has become, to take the abuse --undeserved-- of a selfish, entitled, over-critical and under-helpful society of miserly, withering, "armchair pilot" wannabes with nothing better to do than COMPLAIN.

Is this today, as of this moment, the next best simulation platform? Is it FSeleven? FS2016? No. Of course not. It was never meant to be. IT'S ONLY $15 FOR HEAVENS SAKE! Have the whiners SEEN the prices of FS addons this last DECADE?

But does DTG Flight School show potential...? OH MY, YES. YES INDEED.

I just spent my first total hour of flight time, the first few training missions, a few Alaskan Bush pilot missions and a few touch n' gos around my local real life airport... I HAD A BLAST. In fact I was surprised to find it performing almost just as smoothly "out-the-box" as my heavily tweaked FSX and P3Dv3 except with a slightly BETTER framerate! The amazing effect of the new lighting system (needs some adjustment, perhaps, but attractive) combined with Orbx scenery and higher, smoother framerate equals immersion, sweet immersion... Toss in the simple goal of racking up Flight hours that equate to real achivements and earning licenses, and now, all your flights matter, now getting back on the ground safely means something, now you care.

Dovetail Games still have lots of work to do until they release their full blown DTG Flight Simulator, that's a given, but shame on every poncy, 2 sentence reviewer who bails at the first glimpse of their unrealistic over-expectations dashed in disappointment, ending with, "save your money, refund requested".

Let them leave, they'll never know what their missing!

I have been a flight sim enthusiast since Falcon 3.0 back in the days. I have countless hours in FS9 and FSX as well as in DCS and X-Plane 10. I have basically spent time with every flight sim released since the early 1990's. Today I get most of my civilian flight sim needs satisfied with Prepar3D v3.

With that background I know that I am not really a part of the core audience for FSc but I still think it would be wise to listen to feedback from experienced simmers when trying to launch new products on this niche market. So look at this review from that perspective.

I have played on my rig built in 2012 which I also use for all other sims I play. This is the hardware I use:

Motherboard: MSI Z77-S01
CPU: Intel Core i5 3570K running at 4.2GHz
CPU cooler: Corsair Hydro H100
RAM: 16 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600MHz
GPU: MSI Nvidia GTX 680 Lightning 2GB VRAM running at 1.3GHz (latest stable driver)
GPU cooler: Twin Frozr IV
SSD1: Corsair Force (SATA6) for OS (Win7/64)
SSD2: Samsung 850 Evo (SATA6) for game installation
Display: single Acer 1920x1080 144Hz monitor

Flight sim peripherals
Joystick: Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog
Throttle: Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog
Rudder pedals: MFG Crosswind V2
Headtracking: TrackIR 5 + Pro Clip


The idea of a cheap, entry level sim is great. Flight sims are a rather expensive hobby since it usually involves having hardware with a rather hefty pricetag and buying addons (I don't like the term DLC in relation to flight sims) that aren't cheap. Newcomers really need a way to "try before they buy" and FSc fills a gap and offers that. Smart move DTG.

I have no real performance issues with FSc and for the most part I get a stable framerate with everything maxed. Loading times are good for being a flight sim. One annoying thing is the object pop-in and I think that the old FSX engine is to blame here. FSc isn't really designed to look good on modern hardware and unfortunatly that shows. Furthermore, some aspects of the flight models used seems a bit off. Trimming can be difficult at times and sometimes the controls feel unresponsive. I have played with the available settings (not very many) but haven't found a real solution which is why I blame the FM's.

$15 for a flight sim is a steal. I often pay three times that money just to get one plane for DCS or P3D. And of course there has to be a tradeoff somewhere and in FSc that tradeoff is spelled GRAPHICS. FSc does not look like a flight sim released in 2016. I know, I know... It is based on the same engine as FSX and it is using the same old landclass etc. That wouldn't be a problem if DTG didn't try to hide that fact by using silly PR stunts on the FSc webpage. FACT: FSc does NOT bring a highly detailed scenery with 2016 standards. It does not offer, and I quote, "immersion, unlike anything experienced before". FSc looks rather outdated compared to other modern flight sims and gamers these days aren't stupid. Market FSc as a re-hashed budget version of FSX since that is what it is. It is never a smart move to use false advertising DTG.

Here is my pet peeve in relation to FSc. The missions. FSc is setting out to attract newcomers to the world of aviation and it offers lessons to learn the basic skills needed. Yet basic stuff, like explaining what flaps are, is omitted. In some lessons there is "information overload" coming from the virtual flight instructor since he asks the new pilot to do things that hasn't been properly explained beforehand. The VOR navigation lessons is an example of that. There are also no lessons that properly explains ground handling and taxiing. In my opinion this should definatly be included in a sim titled "Flight School".

Instead of including these very fundamental things, FSc pits you into situations you shouldn't be in as a new pilot. You shouldn't fly over open water in a storm with a plane you know is in poor condition. You shouldn't race the sundown with only VFR qualification just to satisfy customers. I'm baffled that DTG advocates this type of poor airmanship in a sim that claims to be realistic. I also think it is kind of weird that most of the missions involves some kind of catastrophic situations instead of showing how extremely nice VFR flying can be. The nine missions available are also, quite frankly, pretty boring.

The autogen objects. What were you thinking DTG? There HAS to be a separate setting for the amount of autogen objects in a flight sim. In it's current state a lot of areas look like Endor and there are trees and buildings where there shouldn't be any. I can't even fly VFR over my hometown without getting lost because of this. So please DTG - patch in a slider to set the number of autogen trees and buildings! At night this gets even worse since there are light sources on the ground where there shouldn't be any.

Light effects. Something needs to be done about the light effects. You can have sun reflections in overcast conditions and you can see the nav lights through the wings when turning your head to starboard. You have all sorts of weird lighting inside the cockpit that totally breaks immersion. This is totally unacceptable in a game released in 2016.

Draw distance. FSc needs a setting to increase/decrease how far you can see when flying depending on what hardware you have. This is fundamental in a flight simulator. The poor draw distance makes it difficult to fly VFR since you can't really see where you are going sometimes. The object pop-in is also pretty annoying.

FSc fills a gap on the flight sim market. It offers a lot of great features for newcomers. But it shouldn't be marketed as the best thing since frozen yoghurt. Make it the proper flight school it has the potential to be by including lessons on fundamental skills needed to understand how to operate a plane both on the ground and in the air. Provide some theory lessons as well and explain how flaps etc work. Fix some of the annoying issues such as lighting and autogen objects and I am sure you will attract people to the wonderful world of flight sims. FSc isn't quite there yet. Close, but not there.

Do I recommend it? No, not at this point in development. FSc has potential but it isn't quite ready yet. There are simply too many lose ends to make this a good sim even with it's low price taken into consideration. I would suggest picking up FSX on a sale and getting the available flying school for it instead.

DISCLAIMER
This review is based on my opinions as a gamer and flight sim enthusiast after having played for approx 7 hours. The opinions are my own and they are not influenced by sponsorship deals. I do not get revenue from either the game developer or 3rd party for this. I write reviews to help fellow gamers out when deciding wether to buy a new game on Steam or not. Any language errors in this review is a result of English not being my first language. I might edit this review at any time I see fit.

TL;DR Version: I love it for what it is, I'm excited for the future of the product and for Dovetail's next flight simulator, and I think it's worth the money.

Full Version: DGT Flight School is, first and foremost, a new approach to flight simulation, based on the Microsoft Flight Simulator X engine, though heavily modified (64-bit support being the main modification.) So, first things first - I'm coming from a background of a few thousand hours of flight simming that goes all the way back to subLOGIC's FS2, then on to Flight Assignment: ATP, Microsoft Flight Simulator 4, 5, FSFW95, FS98, FS2000, FS2002, FS2004, FSX, and for fun, Terminal Reality's Fly!, plus a host of combat flight simulators. I've flown a LOT, run a few virtual airlines, and more. So, I've been in this hobby more or less for 25 years, and that's my perspective as I write this.

On to the review. The first thing you need to know if you're reading the forums about this product is to understand what a lot of the chatter is about. Flight School is based on FSX, but that's no different that saying that Windows 10 is based on Windows 8 (and all the prior versions of Windows.) Just because it's based on a prior product doesn't mean that Flight School is the next version of that product. It's not, and that was never the intention. Instead, it's a product designed to introduce people new to the flight simulation genre the "proper" way - that is, instead of just dumping them into the pilot's seat and letting them have at it, it strives to introduce the new virtual pilot to flying in the same way that a real pilot would be introduced to flying. And that's the first reason I'm giving this product a positive review: with the exception of ATP, no other product has really done that. I've wanted to see something like this for a long time - and while FSX (and versions of Microsoft Flight Simulator before that) had lessons that were available, the aim of the product was to let you do whatever you want, and if you wanted to skip the lessons and just learn by trial and error, good for you.

Many people were looking to Flight School to be the "next version" of FSX since it was "based on "FSX". Dovetail is working on a full-fledged flight simulator that will likely be close to that "next version" of FSX those people were looking for, but that's not the intention of Flight School. Again, it's based on the FSX engine, but it's not supposed to be the "new" FSX.

So, what is it? It's a simulator that includes two (at launch) beautifully rendered aircraft: the Piper Super Cub, and the Piper Cherokee, along with flight lessons for both a Light Aircraft Pilot's License (LAPL) and a Private Pilot's License (PPL). There is a structure to getting these licenses - first, a series of lessons, followed by a requirement to build hours in Free Flight or Mission modes, then a skills test to wrap it all up. This is representative of the steps a real trainee pilot would go through, and does a good job of giving you a taste of the real thing.

If you're already an experienced pilot, however, this content will not last you very long, and you'll likely move straight into Free Flight mode. Flight School, because it is based on FSX, includes 24,000 airports covering the entire globe, and you can fly into any of them. Here, we see an evolution of the FSX engine. The move to 64 bit has improved performance of the sim significantly compared to FSX on the same machine. The old default terrain mesh and auto-generated scenery has been vastly improved, incorporating textures from ORBX, a company that consistently produces very high quality scenery packages for FSX and it's variations. That alone, as a side note, is worth the price. I never invested in ORBX scenery for FSX due to the fact that on my machine, FSX would likely have run very poorly with it. The improvement in the default texturing between the two is phenomenal.

For Free Flight mode there is a flight planning tool that operates quite nicely, but is a bit more limited than it might appear at first glance. You can basically point and click to generate a flight plan, but what happens is that you're in essence just giving the GPS coordinates to fly to - if you click on a navigation aid, for instance, you don't get a flight plan that includes that navaid's radio frequency. You just turn and fly to those coordinates.

Another area of deviation from FSX is that you are truely flying VFR - no autopilots on these planes, which again is fine with me. The intent of the product is to teach you how to fly, not how to program the autopilot. Yes, airliners fly mainly on the autopilot, but not by pilots with no flight time in their logbooks. When the gizmos go haywire, you still need stick and rudder skills, and that's what this sim is all about.

Potentially the most exciting feature - though currently not utilized to the fullest in my opinion - is the pilot profile, which keeps track of your progress as you earn ratings and build time in both aircraft. Oddly, there's not a "logbook" per se (that I can find) that lists your individual flights, but you do see your endorsements and your overall progression. I would like to see Dovetail expand the profile to include an actual logbook so you can review the details of your flights down the road. Or, if you really want to go all out, hop onto Amazon and buy a real pilot's logbook and keep track of it by hand. That'd actually be more realistic!

Back to the profile - I hope Dovetail continues the same profile into the future. Soon, Flight School will be expanded to include the DA42, a twin-engine aircraft, and new lessons likely aimed at instrument flight rules. Getting an IFR endorsement is something I'm looking forward to. I'm also hoping that when the full simulator comes out (targetted for later in 2016 at the moment) that all those hours and endorsements come over, and my "career" in the Dovetail series continues. I believe this is the plan but confirmation of thise from Dovetail would be nice.

In conclusion, is Flight School "perfect"? Not by any stretch. That was something I was totally expecting. Having lived through the launches of all the prior versions of Flight Simulator, NONE of them was perfect at launch, and only a few of them really improved enough over their lifetimes to really be considered "done." FSX was unique in this respect in that add-on developers had 10 years to work out all the inner workings and improve FSX on multiple levels. I would argue, however (and again, this is directed at those who say Flight School is disappointing them because it's not the "next" FSX) that the heavily modified versions of FSX out there aren't really FSX. Is Flight School an improvement on the base FSX package? Of course it is, though it has a different purpose than FSX did.

I highly recommend you try Flight School out - you can't beat the price, and even for a guy like me, brushing up on my VFR skills and getting a taste of what's to come is worth the price of admission. If you're new to Flight Simulation, go for it - you're not going to go wrong, and you'll not have to "unlearn" a lot of bad habits you'll pick up if you just dive into FSX Steam Edition without any instruction.

Dovetail - great job, keep up the good work, and I'm looking forward to what's on the horizon! Cheers!

As someone who has been simming for over 20 years and has a pilots license in the real world, I tried this title strictly out of curiosity. What I found is that as an instructional sim, this performs great, is stable, visually appealing, and gives great instruction for those new to the flight simulation genre. I look forward to the future developments by DTG and would encourage folks who are interested in learning the basics of aviation, to give this a try and complete the lessons. For existing simmers with $100's of dollars of addons, this is not the sim for you and thats what I see alot of the negative reviews based on.

There is no conditional recommendation feature on Steam, because of this I cannot recommend, however the program can be useful to would be flight simmers.

The idea behind Dovetail Games Flight School is to give newcomers to the genre a taste of what flight sims are all about at a reasonable price. For me it misses the mark, though the price is reasonable.

The program offers the ability to gain two pilots licences by completing various tasks that form part of the basic mechanics of general aviation flying. It doesn’t give much by way of an understanding though, it is good at telling you what to do, but not as good at telling you why.

The program also offers a number of missions of varying difficulty. These are fun, but are at the same time quite frustrating.

Finally the program also offers the ability to freely fly anywhere on the planet using the two (soon to be three) supplied aircraft.

I have used the program for just over 9 hours at the time of writing and my overall experience can only be described as one of frustration. I have over a thousand hours under my belt with FSX:SE and FSX before it, I found the amount of information made available to the pilot prior to any task or mission lacking.

Simple things, like what the heading is of the runway you are being sent to for a mission, some of the strips are very tight. If you aren’t able to set up a good approach it just makes things more difficult and frustrating.

In the lessons, you don’t get to find out exactly what you are going to do until you are trying to trim the aircraft, monitor the speed/throttle and check your heading while the instructor is also filling you in on the facts as to why you are in the air in the first place. This usually results in a failure of that particular mission/task, lots of swearing at the monitor and another attempt. At least you have a better understanding of what the objective is second or third time round.

Now I haven’t been to flight school IRL, I do think though that I would receive a full briefing of what todays lesson was going to be before I got anywhere near the aircraft.

If you can ride the waves of frustration and persevere with the lessons/missions, there is a sense of achievement upon completion. If you do this, there is a good chance that you will enjoy a step up to FSX, P3D, X-Plane or DTG’s upcoming Flight Simulator, so maybe the program is really just one big test.

Despite community hub complaints, I find the graphics far better than many of the available flight sims that have global coverage out of the box. Just make sure your rig comfortably meets the spec requirements and you will have access to a program that performs and looks as good as a £100+ spend on other sims for the sweet price of £11, though there is room for some improvement (clouds, sky, mid-day ambient lighting).

To summarise. It’s a cheap way to find out if you are willing to shell out substantially more on a good flight simulator. If you can put up with the programs foibles it is a good indication that this genre is for you.

<TL;DR>
If you are just testing the water for flight simming this will put you off more than encourage you to progress. If you think it is something you really want to get into, a little perseverance will help in making your mind up.
</TL;DR>

Too annoying for someone trying to leard. Whenever you make a mistake (Which is expected, since the whole purpose of the game is to teach you something you dont know), you´re catapulted to the beggining of the lesson, and have to watch the whole introduction video and instructor talk again, just to get to the part where you will really try something. It´s so boring to repeat anything all the time that I gave up.

Also impossible to lock on the selected video preferences. It keeps changing from windowed/fullscreen mode without any user command.

After spending the last few weeks playing my first flight sim I thought I'd review . First off I had to buy a joystick to be able to play this flight sim .I bought the Thrustmaster T-Flight Hotas 4 from NewEgg and it fits the game perfectly.
Pros
+Price tag at $14.99 a real bargin for the gameplay available
+Differant skill levels from easy to realistic sim is set up for beginners
+The 13 lessons and being able learn the basics and how to fly a plane
+Testing to get your light and private pilots licenses
+The 9 challenging missions all at various skill levels
+Free flight gameplay and being able to fly anywhere in the world in any weather condition
+Decent enough graphics I have my settings on Ultra plays fine with no lag 70+ FPS
+The achievements where a big reason I considered buying in the first place .All other flight sims dont have them.
+Statistics ledger logging all activity in the game from time flown to landings etc.
+View angles when flying
+Very relaxing I chose between a flight sim or a truck sim .Thought flying would be more interesting and relaxing.
+They have since added a 3rd plane the DA42 twin engine with new missions, lessons and achievements.

Cons: none its only $14.99 with a long shelf life.

Flight School is a nice simulator for wannabe-pilots like myself.
For € 15,- it's a purchase you won't regret.
Even though I feel that the program is basically a (very) slightly updated FSX, it's still worth the money and has potential.

Good things:
- The new flight planner is awesome. Very good job there!
- It's running way faster than FSX and at better frame rates

Could use improvement:
- What I didn't like was the required flight hours before I could take the LAPL exam.
I got around this by letting the plane fly and left home to do something fun with the kids. After returning home, I landed the plane and voilá... airtime.
- I'm hoping that the graphics will still be updated.. running on ultra settings, the quality is very poor for a game released in 2016.
- Also I'd like to see some option to skip the cut-scenes. I had to repeat some lessons multiple times. Having to wait untill I could actually do the lessons was kind of annoying.

I really want to give this game a thumbs-up but I can't. First and fore-most: this is a stripped-down version of FSX. What wasn't stripped-down was given a nice polish (mostly). If you have a good machine, the game looks and handles great at max settings. Though you can largely achieve the same result by installing a bunch of add-ons for FSX.

As the name implies, there are a couple flight school "campaigns." There's one for each plane (2) and they basically just consist of lessons lasting between 3 and 10 minutes. While the courses are no substitute for a FAA-approved training sim or (of course) the real thing, it actually gives you a decent idea of real flight mechanics (assuming you turn realism up to max) even you are just playing with a single monitor, keyboard, and $20 joystick. There are also several missions to play. Much like the missions in FSX, they put you in different situations to overcome. The good unfortunately, ends there.

One thing that they actually got worse in their "repolish" of the game is the voices. I know this is a pretty minor thing; who buys a flight-sim for the voice acting, right? It still bears worth mentioning: While the pilot and control voices in FSX are border-line awful, the voice quality in DFS is way worse. It's like listening to a Mac from the 1980s "talk" to me in an English accent. It's comically bad. It almost feels like the person in charge of doing the voices for DFS had put in his two-week notice and totally checked out. Again, this isn't a make or break issue; just one that needs to be said.

But one serious issue which should steer you away from the game is this: crashing and no save files. That's right; can't save. 'Nuff said. But compile this with the crashing and you get a situation that makes it really hard to make progress and actually discourages you from restarting. The game doesn't crash a lot but it's enough to make me want my money back. The game CAN crash at any time; start up, changing settings, during cut-scenes, etc. But individually, those crashes are rare. Where it crashes the most is when it hurts the most: I'll be coming in from a long free-flight trying to add hours to my profile (only way to unlock Licence-test Flights) and just before the destination airport is in sight it'll freeze (not responding). All my time spent does't count unless I make a successful landing. This doesn't occur every time, but it occurs more often than not. The obvious remedy on the user's end is to save frequently and reload in case of software failure. BUT WAIT!!! THERE'S NO SAVE FUNCTION! It's a situation that makes you want to thrash a keyboard like an angry German kid.

If you've already bought the game and you experience the problem, I've found that doing short hops (no more than 15 minutes or so away) in sparsely populated areas (like the Sahara) are usually (but not always) safe.

I wasn't expecting much when I was buying the game (it's more bare-bones than a sun-bleached steer skeleton in the Mojave), but at least basic functionality should be a requirement when asking real money for the game. Currently, it's beta-level quality. It should be a free game with an easy mechanism for quick feed-back until they develop it more.

So in conclusion, as of the date of this writing avoid this game unless you can get it for free. Do not spend money on this game. However I feel despite the freezing/crashing issues, and the minimal content, the game DOES show promise. It might be worth it give Dovetail the chance to finish the game (I cannot accept this as a finished product) and work out all the bugs. Probably a year from now.

DTG never intended for this game to be a replacement for Microsoft Flight Simulator X: Steam Edition. Rather, this game is meant to do two things:
1) Give them a chance to test FSX technology with DirectX 11 and 64-bit processing in preparation for their Dovetail Flight Simulator game.
2) Make flight simming accessible to those who have always wanted to learn but don't want to purchase full-blown sims.

The lessons are not complete and motivated students would do well to take notes and look things up online to fill in the gaps. FSc does not have an extensive in-game library of knowledge like FSX. However, they take the students straight in the airplanes without any ground school lessons in an attempt to get them to try things hands-on.

The missions, at least for me, are all easy to slightly difficult. Only one mission is a toughie and unfortunately the lessons won't prepare students well for it.

The free flight mode is much easier to access than FSX:SE, but it has unfortunately been stripped down. You can fly VFR only and you need to use the useful in-game GPS (which has no in-game instruction explaining its use) to look up things like ILS frequencies and headings for upcoming waypoints.

The colors in the game are pretty bad compared to FSX:SE, which is a letdown when you consider that FSX was released 10 years ago and still looks better right out of the box. Unfortunately I do not feel that the Orbx terrain add much to the visuals. The two planes are nice to fly, and have somewhat functional cockpits. The frame rate on my computer is good.

For US $15, Dovetail Flight School will absolutely not replace your current flight simulator if you already have one. However, it is a challenge for newbies and a good refresher for veterans. This game gives a glimpse of what DTG hopes they can produce by the end of this year. Those who are ready to graduate from Dovetail Flight School and cannot wait for that new sim will feel right at home with FSX:SE.