Air traffic control may not sound like a great premise for a game - but Flight Control manages to bury that notion by distilling what's awesome about plane management (planes themselves are actually awesome if you think about it) into an easy to use, easy to pick up, inevitably challenging title.

In a nutshell - there's three different landing strips. One is for biplanes, one for jet engined planes, and a third as a helicopter pad. These, like the planes are colour coded, so you know what aircraft pertains to which runway. Once planes are assigned - by drawing a route with your fingertip - they turn white and fly automatically to their destination. Otherwise, they can stay unassigned and fly randomly about the screen - so you don't have to have every plane on a pathway at once.

The biplanes and helicopters are very slow, so it's in your best interest to make sure they land as quickly as possible. The larger planes can fly faster, so it's wise to give them a longer route so that the slower planes can land first. Of course, any plane can be rerouted at any time, to avoid crashes - the game will alert you if it thinks a plane is about to collide - and if you crash once, you're effectively fired as an air traffic operative. So the goal is to land as many planes as possible without crashing a single one, otherwise it's game over.

We loved the desaturated graphics and overall old poster style presentation. The music is extremely short and unfortunately plays just once - but if it were a longer track it wouldn't have seemed out of place in an airport cocktail lounge - and sound effects are good as well. A word of caution though, the game doesn't save your current game if you are interrupted, but will save your top score and statistics.

Flight Control can get difficult quick - imagine if a large international airport only had one main runway - and so we would have appreciated either the ability to purchase new runways (obtaining cash for successful landings etc) or more maps. But for the one mode it does have, it's definitely a test of skill. Overall, we think the game is a little on the short side, and while the presentation is great, there's not that much to do - improving the game's feature set and adding at least auto save would merit a higher recommendation.

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Flight Control HD, A

Review by Ben Briggs, June 16, 2010

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