Dovetail Games Flight School Preview

If you've ever wanted to learn how to fly a light aircraft, but the thought of investing in a full scale flight simulator has seemed intimidating, then Dovetail Games Flight School is targeted firmly at you. Does it succeed?

Flight School focuses firmly on teaching flight manoeuvres, from the expected take-offs and landings through trimming the engines and stall recovery before introducing you to flight basics like traffic patterns and slow flight.

It does this through a series of tutorial-like missions with a fully voiced instructor. The instructions are clearly voiced and are summarised in a text line at the top of the screen in case you miss the specifics. This information is adaptive and reacts to whether you are too fast, slow, high or low with constant feedback telling you how to get back on track as well as giving important information regarding the topics involved.

These missions are split into two sets representing two flight schools, one near London covering some basic flight operations leading to a test based on the LAPL (Light Aircraft Pilot’s Licence) and the other based in Arizona covering basic flight procedures leading to a PPL (Private Pilot’s Licence) based exam. Once you've unlocked the final exam for each school you need to have some flight time under your belt before you can take them. Which leads you neatly over to the Free Flight mode.

The games Free Flight mode lets you plan a route to and from almost any airport in the world via a simple click and drag interface and let’s you make some basic changes to the time of day and weather, and whilst it’s not the most comprehensive set of tools it’s more than ample for basic routing. The route then gets pulled into the GPS once you’re on the tarmac, the ease of creating a route makes venturing further afield as you grow more confident quite addictive. The flight time you rack up once you successfully land is per-plane (of which there are two in the base release, the Piper PA-18 Super Cub and the Piper PA-28 Cherokee) and although it might seem a small thing, seeing the counter roll-up when you succeed is a great feeling.

As well as Free Flight there are also a selection of missions to partake in, these are fully voiced and range from flying passengers along a coastal route, to recovering from icy conditions to then land on a runway. These make for a fun change of pace once you can actually make your plane go more or less where you want. They also act as a subtle reminder that you can fly from other places than your “home” airport.

The voice-acting was a pleasant surprise as it’s excellent, it is natural sounding and aids with immersion greatly, your instructor sounds confident and clear and the other voiced characters are well done too. It definitely adds some character to what could otherwise be a pretty dry thing.

Flight School is the first result of Dovetail Games licensing of Microsoft’s Flight Simulator X technologies and they've made some deep-rooted changes, it’s now fully 64-bit and they've made some huge changes to the rendering engine resulting in shinier, more modern graphics all around. Ultimately these engine improvements will follow through to Dovetail Games full flight simulator release later in the year.

If you are familiar with FSX then you’ll be able to see the DNA in Flight School but Dovetail Games have done a great job of modernising the look and feel as well as making it easy to get in and out of a flying session.

The landscape scenery and night-lighting are really very good thanks to a partnership with long time FSX scenery gurus OrbX although it’s disappointing that the actual airports look very bland and basic.

There are issues of course, for a beginner-focused title there are a few odd quirks. Whilst the tutorial lessons have great voice work and prompting, the game doesn't always inform you of what keys/buttons perform the tasks and I often got keyboard prompts even though my joystick/throttle setup had those configured. This isn't an insurmountable issue as you can check in the options at any point what does what but it interrupts the flow and is something you kind of expect to be more obvious and could be confusing.

Also in this preview build there are a total of 15 tutorial-missions split between the flight schools and 9 dedicated challenge missions. This doesn't feel a lot and it’s a shame because they are great fun and it’s unclear if there will be DLC beyond the Diamond DA42 update listed on the Steam page.

Flight School is a solidly put together product, if flight simulation interests you and you’d prefer a more guided experience then it’s well worth keeping an eye on.

Dovetail Games Flight School is scheduled for PC release on the 24th May for £11.99/$14.99/€14.99.