Victoria Falls: a waterfall, not an airport, and it is not the first one here

Nine days after release, the entire public testimony on CLI4D Designs' Victoria Falls is one sentence and one anonymous vote. The sentence is on the Flightsim.to store, left by a verified buyer called wildeyedivokeoko on 16 August 2026: "Excellent product by talented creator. very happy with it". The vote is a single five-star click on Contrail. There is no third-party video, no written review anywhere, and not one forum thread. The only post on the official MSFS forums to mention Victoria Falls since the release went up on 12 August, drew 115 views and no replies, and it was pointing people at simMarket's freebies page.

So this review is mostly about context, because Victoria Falls has plenty of it. This is one of the more thoroughly occupied bits of ground in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Jeppeson2001 has held it since January 2023 with a package HeliSimmer scored 9 out of 10. FSDG built the airport. FSXCenery built the airport before them. Taburet gives away a terrain fix for the same falls, on the same store CLI4D sells through, for nothing. And a hobbyist called Pinepix put a hand-made bridge on Flightsim.to in 2021 with an apology attached.

The first thing to settle is what this actually is, because the name does not tell you. It is not Victoria Falls Airport. There is no FVFA in the package, no runway, no apron, no airstrip and no helipad. It is a landmark scenery: the falls themselves, the basalt gorge below them, the Victoria Falls Bridge with road and rail traffic running across it, the tourist buildings and car parks on the Zimbabwean rim, and a set of corrections to the terrain, road and river elevation that the default sim gets wrong. At €11.26 that distinction is the whole purchase decision, and the store copy leaves it to you to work out.

The second thing to settle is the simulator. Every store that sells it — simMarket, the Flightsim.to store, Contrail, iniBuilds — lists Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and nothing else. iniBuilds states outright that MSFS 2020 is not supported. Contrail badges it "MSFS 2024 Native", which in this case is the right badge: this is not a 2020-generation scenery riding backward compatibility, it is a 2024 build. That is good news, with a bill attached, which the pricing section gets to.

This review draws on 23 sources: the four store listings for the product itself, three trade posts, the developer's own two videos, three forum threads, five competing Victoria Falls products, a full written review of the incumbent, and the developer's back catalogue across four storefronts. Reddit is structurally unavailable in this environment, and at nine days old with two ratings, sentiment-at-a-glance is exactly the thing that is missing here.

What you are actually buying

One SKU, one simulator, four places to buy it. The prices are not like-for-like: simMarket displays prices with whatever VAT applies to your session, which is 0% for an unresolved one, so €11.26 is the floor and not the till figure for an EU buyer.

Store	Price	Simulator	Notes
simMarket	€11.26	MSFS 2024	Published and sold by CLI4D Designs; simInstaller, delivered through the simMarket app only
Flightsim.to Store	$12.99	MSFS 2024	1 review, 5 stars
Contrail	$13.16	MSFS 2024	Badged "MSFS 2024 Native"; 5 from 1 vote
iniBuilds	£9.62 (£11.54 inc. VAT)	MSFS 2024	Listed "Sold out" at the time of writing

The €11.26 is not a sale. simMarket's vendor page carries the same figure with no strikethrough and no discount badge, and the "30-day price low" field that appears on that page belongs to a Taburet Eiffel Tower tile in the cross-sell rail, not to this product. The odd-looking figure is simply a $12.99 anchor converted with tax stripped out.

The download is 204.33 MB and installs to about 283 MB. Version is 1.0 everywhere. The dates disagree slightly by store — Flightsim.to logs release on 10 August 2026 and an update on 11 August, simMarket says available since 11 August, Contrail says 12 August — which is normal staggering, not a patch history. There has been no update since.

There is no MSFS 2020 version, and if one appears it will cost you again. That is not a guess. CLI4D's simMarket vendor page lists 27 products, and the ones that exist for both simulators exist as two separate paid SKUs at two different prices: Yosemite Valley is €8.61 for 2020 and €12.77 for 2024, and Kinsarvik, Geirangerfjord, Bora Bora, Grosser Mythen and the Philippines pack all follow the same pattern. One purchase covers one simulator. Assume that here.

What is already at this location

This is the part the marketing does not mention, and it is the reason the value question is hard.

Product	Price	Released	Sims	What it is
Taburet — Victoria Falls V2	Free	3 June 2026	MSFS 2024	17 KB. Terrain, roads, water and vegetation fixed; falls use the sim's own default animation
Pinepix — Victoria Falls Bridge	Free	2021	MSFS 2020	9.46 MB, 804 downloads, 4.8 from 3 ratings. The author's own description admits "a lot of room for improvement"
Jeppeson2001 — Victoria Falls Scenery Package	€14.00	11 January 2023	MSFS 2020 + 2024	689 MB. Animated falls with sound and mist, 23 miles of rapids, 4 bush strips, 30+ helipads, cable car, bungee jumper. 5/5 from 13 on simMarket
FSDG — Victoria Falls	€11.76	25 October 2023	MSFS 2020 + 2024	The FVFA airport. 3/5 from 2 ratings
FSXCenery — FVFA Victoria Falls Airport	€10.27	29 September 2020	MSFS 2020	The airport again, older. 3/5 from 2 ratings

The freeware scene here is thinner than a landmark of this stature deserves — Flightsim.to lists three scenery add-ons for the whole of Zimbabwe — but it is not empty, and one of the three is free, current, and made by a developer with a reputation. That matters more than the download count suggests.

What the community consistently praises

Almost none of this praise is about Victoria Falls, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. It is about the developer, and it is consistent enough across four storefronts and eighteen months to be worth something.

CLI4D Designs is one person — Clifford Ramos, contactable through the email and Facebook page on his own simMarket vendor listing, where he describes himself, endearingly, as "a scenery developer for MSFS 2020" who also does liveries. Contrail aggregates him at 4.73 across 71 votes over 24 products. His Yosemite Valley for MSFS 2024 sits at 4.8 from 11 reviews on the Flightsim.to store, released 14 August 2025 and still being updated on 7 July 2026 — nearly a year of support on a $14.99 scenery.

The repeating compliment is the water. Reviewers keep coming back to the animation rather than the models. brianf51, buying Waterfalls of Switzerland on 21 November 2025, wrote that "the waterfalls just bring it to life and add a new dimension to the immersion, especially in VR". ciwanicha, on Yosemite on 1 August 2026: "waterfalls with real water action is very cool". The Victoria Falls listing promises the same technique — custom animated rapids and falls rather than the sim's stock animation, which is precisely what separates it from Taburet's free fix.

The second repeating compliment is that he turns up. AirRhodessa, 22 August 2025: "What's also nice is a Dev that updates their products regularly." That is borne out by dated evidence rather than sentiment. When slamo808 complained in early 2026 that the Yosemite waterfalls were rendered too blue, the fix landed and the reviewer edited his own post on 8 February 2026 to say the blue was gone and the result was "perfect now". When a Sim Outhouse poster found in August 2025 that the scenery had knocked El Capitan and Half Dome back to lower-resolution versions, a test build blending Asobo's assets with CLI4D's was in his hands by 22 August. The developer answers in his own name in review threads, and does it technically: on the same El Capitan problem he wrote that the model "was not properly place and the scale is way off. I will update as soon as possible."

On the product itself, what can be said from the developer's own fifteen-shot gallery is that the bridge is genuinely built — a custom arch with a train and lorries crossing it, over a gorge with real rock geometry rather than a smeared satellite texture — and that close in, the falls throw a soft spray haze with a rainbow in it. The curtain is broken into distinct falls along the rim rather than being one flat sheet. It looks like the work of somebody who has looked at photographs of the place.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Every complaint below is dated and attributable, and none of them is about this product, because nobody has publicly complained about this product yet. They are the developer's pattern, and they are the things to check before you spend.

The waterfalls may be silent. Status: still open. Soma123456, reviewing Yosemite Valley on 4 September 2025 and giving it four stars: "when you fly near the mighty waterfalls they are disappointingly silent. No noise at all. Which is disappointing." Nothing in the Victoria Falls feature list, on any of the four stores, mentions sound. Jeppeson2001's rival package has advertised "animated waterfall with sound and mist effects" since 2023. If the roar matters to you — and at Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, it arguably is the point — this is unanswered.

Static crowds. Status: still open. The same reviewer: "NPC characters included as static are quite immersion breaking." The Victoria Falls gallery shows parked cars, buses and buildings on the Zimbabwean rim, which is the same territory.

Terrain overrides can knock back default assets. Status: fixed at Yosemite, unproven here. This is the structural risk in any scenery whose selling point is "improved ground elevation textures" and "fixed road and river elevation" — it is editing the sim's own terrain, and MSFS 2024 keeps changing underneath it. It went wrong once at Yosemite in August 2025 and was patched within a week. Sim Update 6 was in beta as recently as 5 August 2026.

No night. Not one of the fifteen promotional screenshots is taken after dark, and night lighting appears in no feature list on any store. Whether the tourist buildings, the bridge and the town light up at all is simply unknown.

The price sits oddly inside the developer's own catalogue. Niagara Falls, released twelve weeks earlier in May 2026 and built on the same technique — MSFS Addons described its "custom animated waterfalls with lifelike water flow, spray, and mist effects" — sells for $5.00. The same outlet called that "budget tier" pricing, "appropriate for a landmark add-on rather than a full airport package". Victoria Falls is two and a half times that. It is a bigger job than Niagara, and 204 MB against Niagara's smaller footprint says so, but $12.99 is airport money in the same catalogue where the same developer decided $5.00 was the right number for a waterfall.

And the record is empty. Nine days, two ratings, both from strangers, both a single line. Soma123456's aside on Yosemite — "To get your money's worth (they are not cheap anymore) you need to want to keep coming back" — is the right question for a landmark scenery, and nobody has answered it here yet.

Performance and stability

There is nothing to report, and that is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up.

No independent frame-rate testing of this scenery exists. The developer's claim is "Optimized LODs for smooth performance across hardware tiers", which is unfalsifiable at nine days old. The only useful adjacent facts are these. The package is small — 204 MB down, 283 MB installed — against Jeppeson2001's 689 MB and CLI4D's own 1.4 GB Yosemite. AirRhodessa, buying that far heavier Yosemite in August 2025, singled out "the quality of this addon as well as it's performance". And HeliSimmer's one negative on the rival Victoria Falls package was that "framerate can be a bit low around the waterfalls because of the visual effects if you have a lower-end graphics card" — which is a warning about mist effects in general at this location, not about this product.

No crashes, no CTDs, no installer failures have been reported. Nothing has been reported at all. Both simMarket and Contrail deliver through their own desktop apps, so there is no Community-folder step to get wrong — which quietly removes the one thing HeliSimmer flagged as tricky about the 2023 rival.

Who should buy it

The MSFS 2024 sightseer or helicopter pilot who owns nothing at Victoria Falls. Buy it. The default sim's Victoria Falls is poor, the developer has a real record with exactly this kind of work, and you are getting a native 2024 build of the falls, the gorge and the bridge for about the price of a takeaway. Install Taburet's free V2 first and look at what a 17 KB fix already gives you, then decide whether the remaining gap is worth €11.26 — that comparison takes ten minutes and settles the question better than any review can.

Anyone who already owns Jeppeson2001's Victoria Falls Scenery Package. Do not buy this. You already have animated falls with mist and sound, four bush strips, thirty-odd helipads, a cable car and 23 miles of rapids, in a package that works in both simulators and that a reviewer who flies helicopters for a living gave 9 out of 10. You would be paying €11.26 for a second, differently-textured version of scenery you have, and losing the places to land.

The airline pilot who wants to fly into Victoria Falls. Wrong product. There is no airport here. FSDG's FVFA is €11.76 and covers both simulators, though at 3/5 from two ratings with an unresolved jetway complaint it is not a ringing recommendation either.

The VFR bush pilot who wants a base of operations. Not on its own. This is scenery to fly past, not to fly from. Pair it with Jeppeson's strips and helipads, or accept that every flight starts somewhere else.

The frugal simmer. Taburet's Victoria Falls V2 is free, current for MSFS 2024, and fixes the roads, water and terrain in 17 kilobytes. It uses the sim's default waterfall animation rather than custom geometry, so it is genuinely a lesser thing — but it costs nothing, and you should find out whether "lesser" bothers you before spending.

Anyone who wants to hear the falls. Wait. Ask in the developer's Discord first. He answers.

Where it stands today

As of 20 August 2026 this is a nine-day-old, version 1.0, single-simulator landmark scenery with two five-star ratings and no critical coverage whatsoever. Any score attached to it is provisional, and this one leans on the developer's eighteen-month record across a dozen comparable sceneries rather than on evidence about Victoria Falls specifically. If a video review lands in September that shows the falls roaring, this looks under-scored. If one lands showing them silent, it does not.

What is not provisional is the competitive picture, and that is where the difficulty lies. CLI4D has walked into the one location in Africa that MSFS developers had already decided was worth their time, arriving third among the payware and second among the things that animate the falls, at a price a third above the free option and a fifth below the incumbent that does more. Nothing in the marketing acknowledges that any of the others exist. simFlight's editor, previewing it on 22 July, put it more gently than we will: "Very curious about the quality and what else is inside. Because there is already more."

The honest summary is that this is probably a good scenery in a crowded spot, sold at a price that assumes the spot was empty. That is a value judgement rather than a quality one, and it is entirely fixable — by a sale, by a 2020 build, or by the first person who posts a video with the sound turned up.