There’s more than one flight simulator these days? Oddball X-Plane will not have had a long time to savor its exclusivity as a harshly priced but elaborate title. Microsoft Flight has dropped back into the flying race and has even done away with any price tag altogether. A free-to-play version of the game can now be found on Steam.

The free version yields control of few aircrafts, which misses the biggest appeal of these simulations. Still, it’s a good way to test it out and fly over the islands of Hawaii and “hidden Aerocaches” that lurk about. It even introduces a way to collect experience points and serves up challenges, just like a real game. Hopefully, puritans won’t be distraught by all the ‘casual’ elements thrown in the game. This is why the free-to-play version is perfect as a try-out.

More so, the game also allows you to connect with friends through the abysmal Games for Windows Live service, should that be an incentive at all. This is said to integrate achievements, gamer scores as well as additional content.

Just to be sure, we’ll post the minimum system requirements below:

• Operating System: Windows XP (SP3)
• Processor: Dual Core 2.0 GHz
• Memory: 2 GB RAM
• Graphics: 256 MB card capable of shader 3.0
• DirectX: 9.0c
• Hard Drive: 10 GB HD space