I'm no sky god so maybe my experiences will help. I passed my IMC with the minimum of 15 hours PUT (of which 12 was with sole reference to instruments, i.e. 2 hours more than the minimum). I also did about 4 hours in the club sim' which is an elderly version of MSFS. In terms of physical experiences and control feel, it's nothing like flying a real aeroplane but it probably saved me that many hours of real flying (i.e about 450 pounds). I have never felt it worth buying a sim' set-up for home but still use the club one to practice approaches in advance of doing them for real. The other thing that I found very useful at the start of the course was a small 2D procedures trainer called Tim's Nav'. It is freely available on t'interweb. It's not a sim' at all but is a very good way of getting to grips with how to work with VOR, NDB and DME