Dovetail Games Flight School Review

Dovetail Games Flight School sounds like a great idea in principle, a pared down flight simulator with a guided experience teaching flight basics in light aircraft. How does it fare in practice?

Flight School is the first of two titles, the other being Dovetail Games Flight Simulator coming later in the year, to utilise Flight Simulator X (FSX) technologies they’ve licensed from Microsoft. Dovetail have done quite a lot of work on the FSX base too, making it fully 64-bit for performance and improving its graphical abilities.

As mentioned in our preview, the game is aimed at flight simulator novices with a focus on teaching basic flight manoeuvres through a series of missions split into two tracks based on the LAPL (Light Aircraft Pilot's Licence) and the PPL (Private Pilot’s License). These two tracks encompass 15 missions in total and take you from basic takeoff and landing through to using navigational instruments and cross country flying. The final ‘mission’ of each track being a test which requires you to get in some flying time in the Free Flight mode to unlock.

Along with the Flight Training there are also an assortment of nine missions to take on, these range from long distance flights to coping with various engine problems. These are all great fun but it’s a huge shame there aren’t more of them.

The missions and the flight training are presented well with nicely done voicework and adaptive instructions that react to your mistakes. Most of the time Dovetail try to let you recover and have your virtual instructor help you get back on track unless you’ve made a drastic mistake. Some of the training feels a little harsh but overall these are all interesting and fair.

Other than the main Flight Training and Missions modes there is a Free Flight mode that lets you create basic flight plans and fly from a large selection of airports from around the world. Weather customisation is limited to changing the time of day and a selection of fixed weather types with no dynamic weather tied to location sadly.

The fact the training pushes you to undertake flights of your own is a really nice touch and you can certainly spend a lot of time here, the addition of the accumulated flight time is an inspired one. Every time you successfully land one of the two included planes (The Piper Cub and Cherokee) and see those minutes get added to your total time flown, it’s extremely satisfying.

Overall the content is well made, it would be nice to have more than nine missions as it feels a bit of a tease but what is there is fun and well put together. The training missions also flow well but again it feels kind of light, they are all useful and do what they need to but it does feel like important topics are covered ‘just enough’ which could lead to confusion. A few more lessons on subjects like using instruments to navigate and engine management would be great.

Fortunately the control issues from the preview build are gone and Flight School does a much better job of telling you what to press to perform tasks it is telling you without any odd controller confusion. It does have some other issues though, in particular the Multi-Monitor Mode in the graphics options wouldn’t work and would cause the game to just display as a black screen. I also had a hard time getting Fullscreen Mode to stick, mostly because whenever I’d toggle the option it would also toggle Multi-Monitor Mode causing me to get stuck in a weird loop. In the end I just settled for maximising windowed mode which is certainly less than ideal - that needs fixing.

From the outset, Dovetail have done a great job presentation wise; the user interface is appealing and clear to follow and all in all it looks great. There is a pleasing consistency to how all the screens flow into each other and it gives a very professional impression. Once into the game the improvements to the FSX engine are apparent giving a more consistent frame rate and graphically the weather effects along with an ambient occlusion pass definitely make a world of difference.

Detail wise, the scenery and models for the two provided aircraft look a good step up from what you'd see in FSX, although that DNA is very apparent in the titles overall look and feel. Sadly the airports and fields themselves still look very bland and nondescript, even where you spend most of your time in training and missions they aren't hugely detailed. Whilst an improvement over vanilla FSX it’s a shame more love wasn't applied here.

All in all I had a good time with Dovetail Games Flight School and despite the few shortcomings I have with the quantity of missions and the quirky technical issues, it’s a solid little package. As a glimpse into what is to come in Dovetail Games Flight Simulator it’s very promising indeed and as a stepping stone for newcomers to flying it’s certainly worth a look.