Exterior-

I was rather less taken by the exterior than the cabin.  Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with outside the airplane, but there's less to look at, and consequentially less to write about.  The length of the Boeing 757 always strikes me.  While looking down from above the airplane, she seems very thin in proportion to the length, and for whatever reason, the engines look large to me.  I'm sure they're quite necessary to power the aircraft, but I can't shake the mental image of a street car with a massive scoop on the front.  In any case, all of the usual qualities of a good external model are here, with excellent texture quality, plenty of polys for a smooth look, the textures look good from all angles, and stand up to examination far past where you'd zoom in during normal flight.

There are some really nicely done photoreal textures in some of the various equipment bays.  For instance, the landing gear bays, ram air turbine bays, engine access bays, and all the associated doors are covered in some very nice, if somewhat dirty, textures.  One feature that I really like is the landing gear.  When you lift off the ground, they tilt back to 'hang' beneath the airplane.  I always think this looks neat.  However, when you touch down, the effect of the landing gear straightening out again isn't done too well.  It's pretty jerky, and the backs of the wheels can sink into the ground.  There are a ton of different liveries for this bird, ranging from UPS to Air Greenland, each of which are of standard quality, and, as I've said, look good from every angle.  There's an excellent selection, with some 45 different textures, including variations for Pratt and Whitney engines, Rolls-Royce engines, and versions for the -200 and -300 series.

Systems-

Here we go...  It seems to me that a major point in Captain Sim remaking this aircraft for FSX was to show that they are capable of making not just an addon which is pleasant to look at, but that they are capable of producing some of the industry's most competitive and cutting-edge simulation models for FSX.  Rather like the C-130, unless you've flown similar in-depth addons, you have absolutely no chance of making this bird fly without reading the manual, then subsequently reading it again, and then going back to double check the parts you're not sure of.  Now, you can consult the checklist (which is long enough to be in its own download) and spend your first thirty minutes in the airplane getting it read, just to start the engines.  Don't even think about taxiing, taking-off, or even actually moving the switch to start the engines.  No, if you don't have everything in place, you might as well not move the start selector for all the good it will do you.  CTRL+E doesn't work, so you're going to need to learn.  I cannot stress enough that if you're not willing to spend hours going over the hundreds of pages of tedious documentation, then you'll waste a good deal of money.  Everything here works: The Flight Management Computer, almost every single button in the cockpit, the overhead panel, the autopilot, the cabin door lock, it's all here.  This is what you'd be getting yourself into.

Now that I've tried to impress you upon how important it is to understand the aircraft, I'm going to tell you something: I don't understand it, really.  Well, perhaps that's not entirely true.  I can operate the aircraft well enough, but realistically I'd need months of flying this airplane to really go through in order to find whatever significant bugs lay in the depths of the coding.  So, you must know that this was my first plane like this.  Normally I'm more of a GA flyer, but I don't mind a bit of long-haul flights in large jets.  However, I've just never flown something this intense.  We all have to start somewhere, and this aircraft will give me a better experience next time I get an addon with similar qualities.  So, I can tell you how the airplane looks, feels, and flies, but I confess that you might have to look elsewhere for a really comprehensive view on the systems.  I can tell you from what I read on the forums and experience myself that this airplane models every system a pilot uses in flight, but I'm afraid I can't tell you too much about these particular aspects.

The Freighter Expansion Pack-

While alike in the basic aspects of the airplane, the freighter and passenger versions of the 757 are quite different.  They fly quite similarly, but the cargo hold and a couple of features in the freighter model beg a description.  Once you leave your cockpit, you find two stories of cargo bay with some crates already installed, as well as a nicely textured floor.  Crawling from the upper bay down a ladder into the smaller lower bay reveals just where those baggage handlers chuck your luggage.  Captain Sim decided to model an actual real-time loader for both of the bays.  When you bring up the load manager panel (exclusive to the Freighter version) you can display a really excellent loader next to the aircraft that moves back and forth, lifts and lowers cargo, and actually adds weight to the airplane.  It's a tedious process, honestly, as you have to wait for the loader, so only do one at a time.  The reason for this is that when you save one, it resets the airplane with that weight, so your time-consuming progress with the other one is erased.  This is really a great feature, and the cargo and the loader is really top-notch quality.

Flight-

I was a bit surprised by the flight characteristics of this plane.  As I've said, I'm used to either GA addons or a select few airliner packages,  so I was interested to find that her dynamics are quite squirrelly.  Stalling can happen fairly easily and without much warning.  When you make a turn, it almost feels and looks like the body of the airplane is slewing around behind you.  However, with some practice, I think it's easy to acclimatize to the flight characteristics of the airplane.  Those engines provide plenty of force, and as long as you keep an eye on your speed, you won't have much of a problem with the usual parameters of flight.  The mistake that I made was to look at the ground speed indicator rather than the actual airspeed.  The ground speed indicator is a bit more prominently placed than the airspeed indicator, but after some practice I broke that habit.  I didn't notice a whole lot of difference between the two engine variations.  Oddly enough, I found that in cruise, the 757 would start violently rocking from side to side.  Generally, re-engaging the autopilot helped here.  It's an odd issue, and has been addressed by Captain Sim.

Not a bad review, however you failed to mention that for a large number of people the FMC doesn't work without crashing the sim to desktop.

If I were considering buying this plane, that's a piece of information that I'd want to know.

Thanks guys

I appreciate the critique, as this will help me know what people want in future reviews.

I guess I'll do more research, but I didn't run into some of these problems myself.

JSE516-  Yes, you're right.  However, while I haven't flown addons which are similar in programming to this, that doesn't mean I didn't do research about other products.  While I should have explained it better, the CS 757 is, in my opinion, a fair competitor with other airline addons, but this was just my opinion based on my impressions of the 757 and what I've gathered about other products... and I have a feeling that I didn't explain it any better here :p

Things like this are what make outside reviews all so important. Sadly I've yet to read a 757 review which goes into any depth as far as systems or performance, instead most are focused on the beauty of the AC and thereby somewhat misleading.
FFS,  I do hope you can go back and give the FMC a closer look to see if you can reproduce the problems many of us are seeing. Try also to take a look at fuel burn and compare it to RW 757's, as well as performance comparisons between the 3 models CS offers. And please if needed make the necessary amendments to your review  

Kevin,

I strongly encourage your to re-review the 757.  While your review was very well written, you failed to address the fly-ability of the 757.  A quick review of recent forum threads question the fly-ability by users.