Its great, clean, addictive and it isn't Microsoft... A brillitant all-rounder.
Let me elaborate on the above:
Its great: it truly is. If you are even slightly interested in Flight Sims, then you will surely love this one and forget about any other ones you tried before.
Its addictive: OK, so as with most flight sims, you can add/customise many/various aspects of the program to suit your preferences. However, with X-Plane 8, there are so many different areas and features you can customise, that the game keeps you hooked onto the controls for hours and hours of non-stop flying, landing and flight-planning.
It isn't Microsoft: for me this is a veryimportant feature. As with most MS-related programs/applications, they tend to either be too big on install, too complicated or more often than not too buggy/crashing... X-Plane 8 isn't.
To sum it up in a nut-shell: get X-Plane 8, then surf round the net (VERY easy and centralised pages: x-plane.com / x-plane.org / xpgoodway.com / etc...) and download add-ons, aircraft (helicopters, airships, rockets, military planes, historiacal planes, etc...), flight-planning modules, co-pilot modules, flight attendant speech and AI modules, various flight-plans, flight situations, sceneries, etc.... (most are free)... The list could go on and on and on....
Quite literally: the sky is the limit (and beyond since X-Plane 8 is one of the few quality flight sims that cantake you to Mars or the Moon and back)...