OMSI 2: Steam Edition
This is still the best bus simulator. It is a good improvement on OMSI 1.
MAPS/VEHICLES: The Spandau map is much extended with a new chronology function where you can see the routes/fares and most importantly the Berlin reunification/fall of the Berlin wall between 1986 and 1994. Two maps are included the fictional test map Grundorf (one route, the 76) and Berlin Spandau (routes 92 (137), 5 (130) and also two night routes. Two new buses come with this game the articulated (bendy) bus MAN NG272 (GN92) and the MAN NL202 (EN92). The two double deckers from OMSI 1 are improved and the MAN SD202 has two new variants; the D90 and the D91. There are new AI cars including ambulances with working sirens. There is also much more trains in OMSI 2.
– Real player with 3171.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Realistic Automobile Sim Games.
OMSI is a deeply odd and divisive creation, it is at once both an abysmally dire example of horrendous software design, while also one of the profoundest delights available to those with a passion for buses.
Learning the many arcane processes for getting this simulation to work is no small feat. Don’t bother trying to suck-it-and-see - there is no realistic chance of you fully getting to grips with OMSI inside the 2-hour limit for refunds - it requires an enormous commitment of time and energy to achieve a working understanding of OMSI. (In that respect, I suspect it’s not unlike actually learning to drive a real bus).
– Real player with 839.3 hrs in game
IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946
Written as of 25 August, 2016.
I grew up with this game, so I may be severely biased, just a warning. I remember getting the original IL-2 Sturmovik/Pacific Fighters pack way back in 2005 as a starry-eyed little kid. I was fascinated with aircraft from this era and it’s the main reason I know how much about them I do today. And then, suddenly, this new, vastly superior version appeared! I never begged my parents for something so badly in my life, but I NEEDED this as a child. And so I made the money to buy it. Best idea ever. It doesn’t show it, but the amount I have played this game in so many situations must easily be at least 4,000 hours before getting it on Steam alone. But enough of my life story, let’s get into the review of this.
– Real player with 590.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Realistic Military Games.
IL-2 1946 Is a masterpiece in WW2 aircraft simulation and is a must have if you’re craving action in the pacific. To my knowledge, this is the only game that gets it right and makes you feel like you’re there fighting for small islands and atolls in the 1940’s. Whether you choose Japan or the United States, it does a great job at putting you in the pilot’s seat and give you the true feel of the war from the perspective of one squadron. If you choose the Japanese, you really feel the advantage of the Zero or the Val in the early war battles. The flight models of the aircraft in game make you work for it and learn how the real world planes fly, but once you put in the work you see the reward. But as the Japanese campaign goes on, everything gets harder. By the time you’re flying at Iwo Jima you’re in desperation to just survive you’re next mission. Alternatively, If you choose to fly for the US Navy, you start out from the battle of the Coral Sea and work your way to the mainland islands of Japan. For the US Navy you get to choose the Dauntless or the fighter campaign. The main fighters you get to fly as the war goes on are the Wildcat (and subsequent upgraded variants), Hellcat (f6f-3, f6f-5), and Corsair (with variants). In both campaigns you take off and land on WW2 carriers which by itself is boatloads of fun, but the missions are great as well.
– Real player with 388.2 hrs in game
X-Plane 10 Global - 64 Bit
Summary
A true sand-box flight-sim, X-Plane 10 offers a huge variety of options for virtual pilots. Be warned that X-Plane 11 now exists, so you may wish to check that first, if you want the latest version. But version 10 is still a solid offering.
Full review
X-Plane 10 is a first rate flight sim. It is not the latest in the series, as X-Pane 11 has now been released. However I’ve really enjoyed using X-Plane 10 and this sim deserves a positive review. X-Plane 10 may also still be preferred for older machines.
– Real player with 2155.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Realistic Open World Games.
I love it and am addicted to it.
Recommendation:
Under setting- rendering
Put number of roads to something higher.
(You get more roads where they exist in the real world)
Put number of objects to something higher.
(You will get generic boxes (buildings) at those roads)
Put detail distance to medium.
Unclick compress textures.
Put texture to high.
In the beginning I found the planes cockpits to be fuzzy.
Some really are fuzzy or they are meant to be used with 2d cockpits.
But mostly it was because by default the texture-settings where set low and where compressed
– Real player with 572.9 hrs in game
Train Simulator 2022
Preface
As some people don’t seem to be getting this, the reason why I have “played” this game for 2000 hours is twofold. The first is that I like trains. They’re great. This game is a pretty old game and I’ve owned it since about 2009/2010. I’ve probably clocked some 3-400 hours of playtime on this, as I have developed my own routes and driven trains up and down the existing routes. That still leaves 1700 hours. This is due to a glitch in the earlier game. It used to leave a process running that I never noticed that told steam that I was still “in-game” even when I was sleeping or out at uni/work. This wasn’t patched until very recently.
– Real player with 2818.9 hrs in game
Train Simulator. I don’t really know where to start on the game. I have owned it since Rail Simulator back in the days and when it realeased, it was a good game! However, over the years, the game has been upgraded and features have been added. The development of the game has been taken over by DTG that released it as Train Simulator 2012 and offered free updates over the years. And that is where the problem arises. The game was upgraded with new features that clogged the main engine.
You might think, “Hey, new features, that’s nice!” but think again. Most features means more use of resources which, in this game, are pretty scarse. Since the engine is still from Rail Simulator, it is 32-bit, pretty inefficient and it means when you get over 3,4GB of memory (and trust me, you can hit that limit pretty easy!) it runs out of memory and the game crashes in a tempdump, if it hasn’t crashed already in a random crash, which happens quite often.
– Real player with 2654.2 hrs in game
Euro Truck Simulator
As a person who has been a flight simulator addict for going on three decades now… ( I cut my teeth on a green screen IBM bootleg copy of Pilot trainer circa 1988 ) I have often been skeptical of the ‘ground runners.’ Trains, racing cars and boats all have the same singular fundementle flaw on the virtual stage. Primarily that no matter how much you REALLY want it to be true, you are NOT going to get a realistic perspective view of … well … ANYTHING. Land and city scapes will always be a generic reflection of what you just saw and are about to see again. SO; having established my rational for skepticesm, what am I doing here? To put it plainly. I’m cheap and my entertainment budget can be bought. In short for $20 I got the whole euro-truken-paint joben collection. You should too, hopefully here is why….
– Real player with 48.6 hrs in game
I’m torn on this one. There’s no neutral option, so I’ll go with thumbs up.
This is the second game by SCS that I’ve played, the other being 18 Wheels of Steel: American Long Haul. For having released only 8 months later, the improvements between that game and this one are incredible. I would go so far as to say that the graphics, the way the gameplay feels, and the detail of the in-game economy are all objectively better than the previous game. Trucks don’t randomly snap loose like in the previous game. You get fair warning before your character starts dozing in this game. AI traffic uses the right lane now, and it doesn’t turn right from the left lane anymore. The money you earn has more use in this game vs the last one; you buy business licenses to expand your operation into more countries, and you can buy hazmat permits to haul more dangerous (and thus more valuable) cargo. The road system has a more natural feel than the previous game, with smoother turns and smoother elevation changes. There are even subtle new additions like being able to hear ambient noise at certain places like farms and lumber mills.
– Real player with 26.9 hrs in game
IL-2 Sturmovik: Battle of Stalingrad
Where do I start?
I have always played the Il2 Sturmovik series - that is no exaggeration - I picked up my first installment at age 10, which means I have played for half my life.
To talk about the series as a whole would take up so much time that you’d probably die of old age by the time I finished, so I’ll keep it simple. It’s had it’s ups and downs.
This installment though? What a bloody masterpiece. If you’re here then I’m guessing you already have some Idea of what the IL2 series is, and that is a Combat flight simulator with a heavy emphasis on realism, through its flight and damage models. In all of these aspects Il2 Sturmovik Excels, aircraft are painstakingly researched and their flightmodels studied in order to bring them as close to life as possible.
– Real player with 382.9 hrs in game
Must fly in VR. My gunner bailed after our Stuka’s right tank was shot and began to leak over the Kuban. You didn’t trust me, bud? I landed safely at a friendly airfield. Hope the water showed him no mercy. 10/10 would recommend to every flight sim/WW2 enthusiast.
– Real player with 201.7 hrs in game
Lunar Flight
–— ADDITIONAL EDIT —–
It’s been 2½ years since my original review (see below) which still stands. However, I’ve now been able to play this game in VR (Vive) and felt compelled to update my thoughts.
This game is the best VR experience I’ve had to date! It’s easily a better VR experience that DCS which I also spend a lot of time with. Why the high praise? There are a few reasons:
GOOD FRAME RATES - Perhaps due to the fact that this is a relatively simple game, framerates remain high enough to give a good experience.
– Real player with 155.7 hrs in game
This little gem is the perfect homage to 50 years of human spaceflight, and classic Lunar Lander games (originating way back on 1969 text-only computers).
It takes the idea of the old 2D arcade games with realistic physics, and perfectly transcends them into 3D - plus VR support! The audio deserves special mention: the mesmerizing music, plus voice recordings from real NASA missions, create an intriguing ambience.
Considering the ‘Newtonian’ flight dynamics, this game is of “Easy to learn, difficult to master” flavor. There is a learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it feels AMAZING to fly around. The satisfaction of completing Mars missions is just so rewarding!
– Real player with 101.4 hrs in game
Microsoft Flight Simulator Game of the Year Edition
Do not buy this game unless you have an insanely fast internet connection and immense patience
Out of the 180.6 hours I currently have on this game, around 176 of those hours have been spent installing MSFS. To make matters worse, you can’t install the game using Steam- you have to enter an in-game installer that downloads incredibly slowly, if it even downloads at all.
When I first bought this game at release, my installer was bugged and I couldn’t actually complete the download (I always got an error message at random times throughout the download) . I had contacted both Steam and Microsoft support to fix that issue but they both didn’t help at all. A couple months after I’d given up I decided to try and install it again after I saw there was an update and for the first time it actually completed the download. This took several days and effectively commandeered my computer as you can’t close the MSFS launcher without losing all your download progress, and you can’t play other games as the download is very resource intensive. Additionally, despite having internet that’s usually about 20-50mbps down, the download speed for MSFS is more often than not around 3mbps, if not lower.
– Real player with 180.6 hrs in game
I do not recommend this game for two reasons. First, and main reason, is that this game is completely server dependent. Without good quality broadband internet connection, you will not be able to even open the game after a few days. Second, Microsoft and Asobo force what seem like work-in-progress and poorly tested upates/content onto their customers. The sim looks amazing under ideal circumstances, but my overall experience to date has been that of a beta release product. It just comes across as corporate greed, trying to save money by not hiring enough testers, instead getting their customers to do all the testing and bug feedback for them. All the while charging for the game as if it was a finished product. I have wasted countless hours trying to fix whatever bugs they’ve introduced each update cycle, just to have new bugs introduced the next time around, and its beyond frustrating at this point. I do not support this system of development and deployment. All I want is for Microsoft/Asobo to make all updates and additional content optional, even if opting out of updates would disable all online functionality of the game.
– Real player with 166.1 hrs in game
DCS World Steam Edition
I wish steam had a third recommendation option: “Kinda, but…”
This game, and it’s very much a game, is awesome. I’ve had over a thousand (and likely to grow) hours of fun, with some frustrations in-between. Thing is, at its core, DCS is a giant steaming piece of garbage. Nearly everything with the exception of the aircraft themselves is some flavour of “unfinished,” “half-baked,” and “broken.”
A note on the pricing: I’ve spend more money on DCS than on any other game. Though not as much as it might seem, if you do it smart you can get all important modules for 250 dollars. And it isn’t like you’ll be buying modules more than one at a time, you can get literally hundreds, even thousands of hours of gameplay from just one. I recommend you always buy on sales and choose your modules wisely. Do not buy flaming cliffs, or any of the flaming cliff aircraft, those are extremely outdated and “simplified” (though as you would quickly learn, the shortcut “shift+rctr+home” is much harder to remember than the location of the switch labelled “right engine start”, so “simplified” might not be the best word to use here).
– Real player with 1560.4 hrs in game
This game is fantastic, and I’m talking about the 100% free Su-25t simulator you get by downloading this program right here, DCS, for FREE.
The Su-25t isn’t just one plane to fly in a game like War Thunder, it’s a complete old-school single player simulator. You get ten or so training missions covering every important function of the aircraft.
You get another ten or so individual mission scenarios, + again that number of quick missions and on top of all this you get a full campaign.
Along with that full campaign you can also find additional campaigns online, really high quality player made campaigns.
– Real player with 1143.4 hrs in game
On The Road - Truck Simulator
i would say yes and no for recommanding this game the game is oke for the most part but the thing they need to fix are the AI on highways for the most time the just stop driving for no reason and the steering with mouse,keybord,controler the steering is way to akward to use it is just to slow with steering that you can’t play the game without a steering wheel.
i like that you have thing that euro truck doesn’t have like box truck,semi and combination trucks and that you can get out of the truck.
– Real player with 20.6 hrs in game
Well I couldn’t wait for this game to be released today. But what a dissapointment. No wheel Support at all and i did manage badly to get my pc 360 controller to work but its still not good. I was not impressed with the graphics compared to Ets2 or other driving sims I have. For a game in “Advanced Stages” it’s very poor. Avoid for the time being untill they have got it fixed. Needs Wheel support and done to the standard of other good sims with ffb. I think Multi screen support would be nice too. I am a fan of Early Access but after playing with this for about 30 min i gave up as its not playable in its current state.
– Real player with 18.6 hrs in game