Microsoft Flight Simulator is an absolute triumph. It’s a return of the classic simulator where its only purpose is to make it seem like you’re flying in an actual aircraft, and MS Flight Simulator does its job beautifully with photorealistic renderings of planes and a live-updated world map.
But some people want their games to have an actual game component to them. Flying around in a Cessna is all well and good, but people get bored if there’s absolutely no structure to your actions.
That’s where NeoFly comes in. NeoFly is a free mod that you install beside Microsoft Flight Simulator to basically add a career mode to the game. The mod both provides and tracks your progress by adding money and experience to your career as a pilot. Crash your plane and you’ll need to buy a new one. You also can’t buy the most expensive aircraft at the beginning, and you’ll have to upgrade your pilot’s license in order to fly larger or more specialized aircraft.
You'll start off flying a lowly Cessna 152, the old single-prop plane that has been the mainstay of MS Flight Simulator since the franchise got started back in the '80s. From there, you'll earn money by performing tasks--usually flying cargo and passengers from place to place. As you gain money, you buy bigger and better aircraft and get better licenses to qualify for more difficult (and therefore more lucrative) jobs.
Those jobs can get pretty neat. One has you perform as a VIP pilot to get a secret passenger to their destination without the paparazzi catching on. Or you can do "pizza delivery" missions where it's basically implied that you're smuggling drugs to a specified location.
And then there are "emergency" missions where you fly a medical team to a random location, which means landing on whatever flat patch of ground you can find.
The latest version of NeoFly even adds a "live emergency" function that uses Bing alerts to generate missions based on real-world events near you.
Additionally, aircraft maintenance requires that you spend money to take care of your plants, otherwise you might experience a random accident. Or if you'd prefer to be more of a manager, you can hire AI pilots to fly your planes for you. They'll just take 20% off the top.
NeoFly is absolutely free and is a great way to spice up Microsoft Flight Simulator. Maybe it'll even inspire Microsoft to add a career mode in a future update.