XPL

Product Information

Developer

Orbx

Purchase From

Orbx

Price

$24.95 AUD

BUY HERE

Version Reviewed

1.0

Press Copy Provided By

Orbx

FSElite's preferred Flight Sim vendor is SimMarket. (Why?)

As per our Community Charter, all of our reviews are free from bias, prejudice and favouritism. Don't forget, each reviewer has their own style and thoughts, although they all abide by the Review Guidelines - something I suggest you read.

Edit: Upon hearing the community and taking a further look into what we have come to expect from the developer, the reviewer has decided to lower both the presentation scores – due to the scenery lacking detail in features such as the airport – and the features score, due to this possible retracting from the overall experience. As a result of this, the value score has also decreased to come more in-line with the changes; this still remains a good aspect of the product, however, due to the vastness of the landscape, as explored in the following review.

Introduction

Monument Valley is a natural wonder of a region, located on the Colorado Plateau (on the Arizona-Utah border), covered in a plethora of sandstone buttes. The peaks in the area reach up to 1,000ft above the valley floor and have played home to many Western American movies since the 1930s from directors such as John Ford.

In this scenery, produced by Orbx’s returning developer Frank Dainese and his developing partner Fabio Bellini, the beauty of this landmark location has been excellently translated into X-Plane 11.

Product Information

Developer

UK2000 Scenery

Purchase From

UK2000 Scenery

Price

£16.99

BUY HERE

Version Reviewed

1.0

Press Copy Provided By

UK2000 Scenery

FSElite's preferred Flight Sim vendor is SimMarket. (Why?)

As per our Community Charter, all of our reviews are free from bias, prejudice and favouritism. Don't forget, each reviewer has their own style and thoughts, although they all abide by the Review Guidelines - something I suggest you read.

When you think of major airports in the UK that play a large role in the British economy, what comes to mind? London Heathrow is likely right at the top of that list, Gatwick is probably in there too, and Manchester is surely there too. I’d nearly put money on it that East Midlands is somewhere toward the bottom.
It might surprise you to learn that despite being the 13th busiest airport in the UK in 2016/2017, having handled only just over 4.5 million passengers, it plays a huge role in receiving and dispatching huge amounts of cargo every year. In fact, it serves 36 destinations spread over 10 cargo operators, just with freight alone. That’s a huge amount of cargo for a single-runway airport! So if you’re a simmer like myself who enjoys hauling your MTOW of cargo on the odd occasion (mainly because cargo doesn’t complain about those hard landings), you’ll appreciate the job that UK2000 have done in bringing their rendition of East Midlands to X-Plane.

Presentation

UK2000 have always been a name that represents quality and accuracy in sceneries for Prepar3D and FSX (and they even still develop for FS9), and so to expect the same with the X-Plane products is a natural thing. Fortunately, UK2000 doesn’t let us down by just running their sceneries through a conversion and calling it a day – they’ve quite clearly spent the time making sure every last detail is perfect for the X-Plane world. Comparing with satellite imagery, you can spend time yourself going over the airport grounds and spotting out small details like light placements, one by one, and finding that they’re exactly where you’d expect to find them.