I really want to like this game. Conceptionally it's an awesome idea. It's great to do something other than shot and blow up for once, and I love flying enough to make it my career (I'm a professional pilot).
The problem is the flight model. It's utterly indecipherable. Sometimes your plane will take off happily, others it will fall out of the sky like a rock.
The game is in a weird place where the flight physics model is trying to be too realistic, but the information and feedback is too game.
There are a lot of things an airplane or helicopter can do to increase lift, and none of that seems to work here. When in VTOL mode, your wings do nothing. When in airplane mode, you can't control the airplane much beyond pitch and thrust. Directional control is non-existant.
I'm hoping they can completely redo the flight model. The base game is there. I've owned the game for 2 years and held off on this review to give them time to fix these issues. I'm hoping in the future I can change my reccomendation.

This game is hugely underrated. Don't let the steam reviews fool you, this is one of the most exciting flight sims I've played in many years. I'll get to why there are some negative reviews, but before that here are a few things that makes this game completely worth the full price:

- They strike the perfect balance between realism and fun. Most simulation games of this type get tedious really quickly because they ask the player to spend huge amounts of downtime doing nothing. That is not the case with Frontier Pilot Simulator. There are moments of downtime on the longer haul flights, but this is well balanced and there's plenty to think about in terms of managing your fuel load, hazardous weather and terrain, and tricky landings.
- Flying is challenging, but very rewarding. It is completely playable with keyboard and mouse but I'd recommend playing with a controller as this makes modulating the throttle in VTOL mode easier.
- Damage is modular. If you fly through a water geyser you can take damage to specific components which will affect the performance of your craft in different ways.
- Weight is fully simulated. Upgrades, fuel and cargo all change the weight of your ship. Flying a heavily loaded ship is a serious challenge.
- When flying in CTOL mode you can save fuel by not burning at full thrust, basically it's simulating the fact that lower speeds mean less air resistance and better fuel economy. Likewise, flying at higher altitudes is also more fuel efficient. I love that they've added these details into the game.
- While this game obviously doesn't have the graphical fidelity of Microsoft Flight Simulator, it does still look incredible. Everything from the landscapes to the weather effects look great. I love a good sunset, and this game has some of the most beautiful sunsets I've seen in games.
- The game has a dynamic economy. The world changes over time and so does the available missions and cargo that you can transport. This can be a huge advantage as you can sometimes find cheap cargo that can be sold at exponentially higher prices in places where it's critically needed.
- The pacing of the game is spot on. You don't advance so quick that progression seems trivial, but you also don't have to grind for hours to buy upgrades and ships. Within the first few hours you'll get several upgrades for your initial ship and if you take the right jobs and don't screw up too much you'll be able to buy your next ship within a reasonable amount of time. The game emphasizes challenge and mastery as opposed to time spent.

So why the downvotes on Steam? To be honest I think this game deserves a lot more credit than it gets, but here are the main reasons I think some players take issue with the game:

- On the highest graphics settings, the framerate takes a big hit. I can imagine that this game would struggle on less advanced hardware. The way to get around this is by playing around with the graphics settings. Some settings, like reflections, have a huge impact on performance. However if you have a good gaming system and play around with the settings a bit, you can still get it looking fantastic and running buttery smooth. That said, the performance issues are legitimate complaints and the devs will have to address it to ensure the success of this game. Right now it is hurting sales.
- I think some players are expecting more content. I would love more content as well, but I do think there's plenty here for the price. Whether more content comes in the form of free updates or paid DLC wouldn't matter to me. I do think including more content would help the long term success of the game.

If you're on the fence about this game and you have a decent gaming PC, just go ahead and buy it.

Update: After playing further, you're better off waiting for more features, I'm switching it to not recommended. The core game is a lot of fun, but the flight model can be incredibly frustrating, and weather patterns can be absolute BS. I get this is a sim game, but I shouldn't have less than 3 seconds to react to a high wind alert from the meteorological center, or having to wait at a base with a load of cargo for an actual IRL hour because the radiation on the planet is so high that I can't even reach the bases above 1600m that need the cargo.

To circle back, yes, I really had about 3 seconds to react to a high wind alert, and as a result I lost story mission cargo that got stuck on the side of a mountain after the game slammed me into it and blew me up, so it's impossible for me to retrieve without spending a frustrating amount of time trying to remain level enough in VTOL mode to grab it. Additionally, there needs to be a buy-back option at all bases. Without paying attention, I accidentally sold some extremely hard to find cargo (called geo-tools or something like that) for a story mission, but now I have no option to buy it back, and none of the other bases in the game are currently selling it.

The death mechanic needs some work. Currently it's incredibly inconsequential and also extremely annoying. After you crash, you're immediately ejected in a little life-pod which is cool, but you have to sit in the life-pod and watch it fly across the map to the nearest base. Sounds cool, except you can spend up to 2 or 3 minutes twiddling your thumbs waiting to respawn while the games AI autopilot flies you to a base 70 km away.
Also, if you die, there's no marker on the map where you crashed, so it's incredibly annoying to waste fuel hovering around canyons hoping you might get a glimpse of the cargo you dropped if you're lucky enough to remember the general area you crashed in.


Underneath all this BS is a really good game, but the current flight model that fights you at miniscule twitch and the in-game mission design is questionable at best.

Pretty rough around the edges, and the flight model is really questionable at times, especially in flight mode when you're not using the VTOL mode. There's no great option to turn in flight mode, every time I try to conduct a turn, it feels as if the game is fighting me and doesn't want me to course correct at all, but suddenly releases the controls and I go from a slow roll into being upside down in under a second. Overall pretty fun if you're into delivery games like this. My biggest complaint was flight mode and information flow, you could pick up cargo or a person and only get a single message that disappears after it tells you where to go, but that seems to be addressed in the newest patch, haven't checked it out yet.

Another complaint was the general performance of the game after patches. Sometimes it's buttery smooth and jaw dropping at how cool your ship is, soaring through the skies being a space trucker, then a patch will drop and you'll be slugging along at 15-30 fps until the next patch drops and fixes it again, despite me exceeding the recommended requirements.

My other opinions involve the general landscape of the game. The first island is great and has a believable landscape, but once you get your 2nd ship and to the mainland, the landscape becomes annoying to navigate because of how weirdly designed it is. It's a very mountainous region, but it's like the devs held the terrain tool for as long as they could to make weird, thin, tall mountain spikes instead of taking the time to design more realistic peaks and valleys. It feels like a very outdated approach to environment design. I get why they're their for gameplay, but I think the devs could do a better job that throwing in textured spikes and calling them mountains.

If you can see past the bugs and are ok with general weirdness/hiccups of game performance and some gameplay elements, this could be fun. If you're a flight sim enthusiast, maybe wait a few months until they figure out what's going on with the flight mode model, because honestly I can't make heads or tails of how they expect us to use it other than flying in only a straight line, it feels extra frustrating because there's runways at a few of the bases, too, but they seem pretty useless for landing, I often find myself getting to as high of an altitude as possible and slamming back into VTOL mode because the repair cost is much cheaper than replacing my lost cargo..

If you're going in expecting a full suite of features and a responsive, perfect flight model, this probably isn't for you. I really wish there was a "meh" button for games like this. It has the potential to be great, but it's not there, yet.

There's a really good base game hidden in here, but it still needs a lot of polish.

Big Edit, and a reason more to give a negative review!

I was permanently banned from the forum for being "Toxic":

""Since the comments aren't enabled:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/RobbyAngel/recommended/673210/

Let me comment here.

The war started in February 2022, with some rumors it would begin around late December 2021/January 2022

The game was abandoned in early December 2021, and by then the team already had gone silent for over half a year.

So... nope, the war has nothing to do with why the game got released in the state it did.
The previous big update and announcement hinted that a lot of content would be added.

Instead, it suddenly got released at 1.0 and the optimization was thrown out the window.

"Update will be slowed down"

Yeah, huh... No update for over 3 years is more than a slowdown."

Please, bath in all my toxicity.

Original review:

The game just came out of early access, and we are still waiting for a changelog to know what changed from the last EA patch to the final release version.

Devs have been silent for quite some time now, so hard to know anything.

One thing that changed for sure is that performance is now completely dead, it wasn't great before but now it has very low fps.

They also added an arctic island up to the north, I mean, yet another completely square copy pasted randomly generated heightmap with a snow skin. I can't believe they tried to hyper us with this last year.

The tiny islands they added some months ago were more interesting.



Still no sign of NPC ships, and I'm ready to bet the canyon storyline is still unfinished.

If you like to pilot a vehicle and move goods/people around and absolutely need your fix with a new game, it might be for you.

Otherwise, wait for a performance patch, or better go find another game.

Aggressive DRM, Cannot play offline or non-current version.
Thank you for punishing an honest purchaser of your game.

Played this for a few hours last night and was very impressed.
I come from a background of flight simulators. I have thousands of gaming hours spent on numerous sims. So much so that they were getting very stale and boring, so I very nearly didn't give this a try, but I am glad I did.

The game gives a fresh taste to the tired old flight sim genre. It has a few flaws, of course, but nothing that detracts from it's enjoyment. In fact the only real noticeable fault for me was the translation into English for some of the text. It just wasn't quite right in places, but it is a small ♥♥♥♥♥♥ and doesn't really matter.

Gameplay is pretty simple in the buy low - sell high style. There are also passenger and cargo missions. As some have said, it's a little like a flying Eurotruck Simulator 2 game. There's no tutorial as such, just a few help screens. But a little practice is all it takes and a basic understanding of VTOL flight helps.

Graphically, the game is very immersive. The landscapes, the sound, the weather etc all add up to believable world in which to operate.

Controls are difficult. I'd recommend using a controller over a HOTAS if you can, and don't even think about using mouse and keyboard unless you have enormous patience.

Ship wise, you have 3 to choose from. Let's call them light, medium and heavy. Some reviews have said the light starting ship is awful. I disagree, it's fun to fly. The problem comes when you upgrade it's parts. Then it becomes a flying brick. Getting the second ship allows you to cross the ocean and unlock even more zones to work in.

All in all a very good game well worth your money if you're into the kind of space/flight trading sim. I don't know how long this will keep me amused but it certainly makes a very good time filler. If the game is regularly improved and updated, it might well become a firm favourite.

One last note. This game could be even better if it had an immersive in-cockpit view. Whilst the choice of 3 cameras is fine, immersion would be greatly increased if you could actually feel like you were flying in a vehicle instead of operating a drone. A fully operational cockpit would make this a true sim. Also, a little more variation in the ground terrain and texture would go a long way.

Frontier Pilot Simulator is a shell of a potentially fantastic game that will never be realized. Left permanently in a very unfinished, open-beta state by developers. The flight model also needs serious work that it will never receive.

Unfortunate.

I can't. I want to but, I just can't endorse this. This is sci-fi jet plane trucker simulator and it looks cool and I love the idea, but the execution is lacking. This isn't some honorably realistic aero simulator so don't expect that from it. Actually, don't expect anything at all from it other than a challenge and cost effective entertainment.

This is a Unity game with Unity problems. Sometimes the game will hitch when other aircraft fly by or it updates the weather. Early it just completely flips out. Depending on your situation, you either have to re-trim or it kicks and spins out the bottom of your aircraft in a unnatural way. Having played KSP for thousands of hours and using planes in that game: I can see the frayed edges left by Unity in this one. What has been built so far is an accomplishment, but it will forever be held back by this. It needs to look better than it does, play better than it does, consume fewer system resources than it does, and hold fewer frustrations to compete with other games or even other sims. It has performance issues that might prevent them from ever implementing VR or increasing world detail.

Its been in early access for two years and does not allow you set individual controller axis to individual things. Its always a combination of in game controls which makes for some interesting compromises when establishing a control scheme for the two different flight configurations: VTOL (direct lift) and airplane (winged lift). The UI is extremely finicky until you figure out what buttons get you in and out of contexts. When you are in a context menu, you cannot hit "hotkeys." I can't easily compare modules for my ship or see the resulting stats in terms of efficiency or performance. You can't see what the constraints in physical space are on your ship or load up multiple crates or partial crates. Functional but unpolished. Its hard to tell what is a controller conceit and what simply hasn't been refined yet.

The quests and the small basic world they have are the best part of the game because you are using your skill for something, but when they bug, or don't pay you, or you fail (by killing your passenger by ineptitude) there isn't a lot you can do but keep going and hope something else triggers. Sometimes cargo will have quest triggers on it but the largest stuff in the game does not and the margin on it is inferior to stuff you can haul in non maxed out ships.

I had fun trying to snag crates off of ledges and in literal corners of settlement geometry that were simply inaccessible unless I hovered into position just right but then lose the engine because "it touched." But several service drones later, the fat ox picked it up. And then you recall the reason there is cargo on the ground is due to crashes on takeoff because of some weird sliding that I'm all to familiar with in KSP. Or the weather, or smashing into a mountain. I wonder what happens to all my dead passengers?

Weather will transition instantly and completely. It doesn't come over the world like a wave, it just instantly changes world condition like a light switch. The game tries to warn you with messages but the sky doesn't change until... click. If you are unlucky, it kills you. There is a repulsion field around the balloons, which does not appear on radar. There is also a fair bit of RNG involved as when the radiation ceiling is too low, you simply won't be able to get to certain places or take off from them. I shouldn't complain thou: in my head-cannon, that radiation prevents automation from taking over the aerospace infrastructure. There needs to be a "wait for condition" button.

This is complicated by the reality that these machines fly like bricks. To be fair: they are bricks, but it worse than I expected. It seems like their control authority during winged flight is more dependent on engine throttle than on air speed. Even the biggest ship wobbles uncontrollably when switching modes. Energy loss on climb doesn't seem right and the wings go from full lift to zero lift as soon as they are retracted giving no time for the engines to take over unless the pilot is extremely deliberate. It doesn't seem realistic, but then again these speeds and weights are also questionable. There is something odd about relative air speed because the vehicle will appear to stall when turning into a head wind and play Mach effects when cruising with a tail wind. The indicated stall speed is also incorrect. It either doesn't account for current weight or is calculated without considering that at that speed, you won't be able to control angle of attack anyway. Its a good thing flaps increase control authority. All of this makes it extremely difficult to land on a runway, which you might be forced to do if low on energy. There are zero tools that I found or training to aid in what would otherwise be a basic landing.

I will still play it because I genuinely wanted to learn it and have fun with it but its a early access game that I do not expect "finish."

This a simulator where your task is the same as other similar games, deliver stuff in exchange of money but this game brings lot of different things in terms of environment and of course what we will be piloting.

Set in the year 2236, we are pilots of ships called (if I am not mistaken) "CargoSpaceways", ships designed to help us in our tasks to maintain and help to colonize the new habitable planet.

Gameplay
First of all let me clarify that for this game you will need a gaming pc or laptop, in order to enjoy it with higher graphics being also important to play this game with a controller. For the people who have already play tons of simulators there is no much to say since you know what you are going find when it comes to take flights, take care of the vertical landings, wind and temporal.

Now, for everyone, our ship has a battery, which has to be charged constantly and won't be free so we cannot just fly for fun and refuel or ship whenever we want before doing some jobs before, another thing is that we are not paid monthly, we are paid with every single job we do and sometimes the fastest we do our tasks means more income.

If we are in the middle of nowhere with some cargo or a passenger and we run out of fuel our engines will eventually stop working and we will do an emergency landing, if we are not lucky enough to land in a safe place our ship will be destroyed and our cargo will be dropped on the place we had the accident making it sometimes irrecoverable.

We won't lose any ship or upgrade and we will be sent in an emergency capsule to the closest base so there is no death option in this game.

Upgrades and unlocks
After the first jobs we will be able to upgrade our ship with improvements in our engines and chassis with stats like power and rigidity even the capacity of the batteries but in this game weight is a very important factor, since the heavier you are, the slower you will move or if you have lot of cargo or you make your ship very heavy you won't be even be able to ignite the engine properly and may stay in the ground forever.

With some more jobs done we will be given the choice to buy a new ships, generally with a completely different design and way better in maneuverability.


Envionment
The name of the planet is Astlan and works like the Earth with some extra elements to play with and commonly volcanic islands and temporally emissions of gases in the atmosphere and something that must be taken into account is the wind since depending on what time it is and your currently position will be harder to maneuver.

Apart from that "natural" enemies all we have are allies that will sell and buy us any type of material we need, the IA in this game thinks you are a full time employer that can be divided into thousand pieces to make thousand task at the same time because they will send you requests via radio even when you are busy or already carrying people in your back.

•Dozen hours of entertainment due to the immense amount of space and quests available

•For being a early access game and requiring internet connection just for security reasons seems a little bit overpriced to me(23€), thing that could be fixed with some flash deals.

I really like simulator games and those where the reality can be applied to the games so having one for flying with advanced mechanics with good quality makes this game unique in its genre.

The game comes with weekly updates and when it goes out of early access it may be worth the actual price.

UPDATE (14th April 2019):

After seeing the latest changes, I've decided to give this game another try.
As such, and after finishing the current quest line, I'm updating this review to showcase the current state of the game.

I will keep my old review so people can see how the game progressed since.

----------------------

Imagine Truck Simulator only that your truck is a V-22 Osprey with jet engines and you're flying in a very hostile and unpredictable environment.

Also, you've got three "Osprey"s to choose from: small, medium and large, with each handling differently.

- the game eases you in via various special assignments you get from time to time, progressing you from the small starter ship to the huge whale that is the Ballena
- the current three playable aircraft have distinct handling to them and cargo space
- ship handling can be further affected by changing various ship parts, like the engines, which can make taking off with a certain cargo load range from downright impossible to easy mode
- the sudden change in environmental effects can transform a boring cargo run into your ship exploding mid flight because you didn't pay attention to the ATC warnings
- there will be times where it's just better to stay grounded or avoid certain locations altogether
- furthermore, there are static environmental hazards that you need to be aware of: volcano ash, which kills your engines and makes you fall like a brick, and super-geysers, that blow up for an entire kilometre, turn your ship into a paper plane and flip you upside down
- there is also an interesting aspect regarding altitude: the higher you are, the less fuel you will use and go faster (less drag), the catch being that there is an EM radiation ceiling which kills your engines if you go too high
- while not a major factor, wind is also there and you will have to fight it at times, especially in the starter ship
- the medium and large ships have an alternate flight mode that allow you to apply thrust horizontally, much like a Harrier or Osprey, which is the way to go for long-distance hauling
- G forces are also simulated: too much G force and your ship explodes
- each cargo type also has its own G force limits: go over the limit and your cargo gets damaged which means less money
- most of the jobs you'll get will have a timer which forces you to find a way no matter the weather conditions if you want to be paid well or not fail the job
- very enjoyable with a HOTAS setup

- (still) no cockpit view, though the devs have said they are working on one
- (still) no flight vector UI: hopefully that will be with the cockpit
- the actual aerodynamic simulation of the aircraft is not on par with a sim and feels more like a sim-lite or even arcade at times
- no landing ATC: you can land wherever, whenever and however you want; whether this is a a con or not is up to you
- mouse & KB controls are not enjoyable at all and a detriment to the experience: devs should actively advertise the game as meant to be played with a controller or HOTAS
- some of the controls in the menu are not explained at all or seem unused
- a dead sandbox: no AI whatsoever (and haven't heard anything recent about this); you are the sole VTOL pilot out there despite in-game comms that suggest otherwise
- for how it looks, the game runs very poorly: on a GTX980 I had to drop many options and even then there is still the occasional slowdown; also, the game doesn't look much better at max settings despite running far worse than Star Citizen

The devs are still visibly working on the title but development seems very slow in terms of actual updates so keep that in mind: if you are expecting many sizeable updates quickly it's unlikely that you will get them.

That being said, the devs are listening and are making changes based on user feedback.

While it is a far more enjoyable game than when it first came out it feels like it still has a ways to go before I can recommend it, especially due to the slow updates.

----------------------

OLD REVIEW, from 23rd March 2018:

I like the idea behind the game but that's pretty much where it stops for me and I'll try to explain why:

My main problem is the claim that this is a simulator: it's not.
- there is no cockpit view
- the two playable aircraft, despite their size difference, control very similarly
- despite the wind simulation, the actual aerodynamic simulation of the aircraft feels very arcadey
- no realistic damage simulation: clip a building at 40mph? you lose some percentage of component damage and that's it
- extremely limited controls: no engine tilt, no gear up/down, no flaps control
- no ATC: you can land wherever, whenever and however you want
- no flight vector UI element
- no horizon UI element to understand if you are level or not
- no HOTAS support

There are other problems as well which I would expect a good developer to fix during EA, such as:
- the cluttered UI
- the big, in your face, mission prompts
- the lacking tutorial: not all controls are explained but it does have one and it explains the gameplay elements well
- poor KB & mouse controls: the mouse is basically a paperweight in this game
- a dead sandbox: no AI whatsoever (it is planned though)

So, with all that being said, I cannot recommend it at this time.

If you've got a VR headset, check out VTOL VR instead.

Another option would be ArmA3: Apex XD