Flight Control

Ground Control to Major Disaster, come in, Major Disaster...

I have no idea what it's like to be an air traffic controller. I would hope that air travel across the world is a nice and organized affair, where planes stick to their predefined approaches to the runway, and the pilots are capable of thinking for themselves if needed.

Basically, I hope it's a lot easier and less stressful than the mobile game that is Flight Control, a little game about juggling aircraft that very quickly spirals out of control...

Let's see how many happy landings we can get in this one.

Fun Times

As you can see, I'm playing Flight Control HD on the PC, so I can't use the excuse of my finger getting in the way of my airfield because I'm not using touch inputs to guide these planes in to land, but my mouse.

It's simple: select a plane and draw it a route towards the runway of the same colour, red or yellow, or the blue helicopter landing pad for helicopters, obviously. And that's it. The more you land, the higher your score.

While those are the controls sorted, actually getting on top of being a flight controller is a little more involved. Planes will come in from different edges of the screen, at differing speeds, wanting to use different runways, and you won't know where they want to go until you can see what kind of plane they even are.

Drawing them a route sounds simple and often is - right until the moment when planes come close together, alerting you to a potential collision, and nobody wants that because it'll end your run in an instant. Indeed, it's the only way your game will end, to my knowledge - by there simply being too much for you to juggle at once.

Successfully landing a certain number of planes, spread across multiple attempts, thankfully, will unlock new airports for you to try your hand at controlling over, including aircraft carriers out to sea and airports in the outback, where emergency landings will come charging in and won't deviate their course for anything, ensuring that you'll be quickly redrawing your flight paths a few times before a plane even lands.

If you're looking for negatives about Flight Control, this is it. As in, this is all there is to it. If you're not interested by what you see, or by what the gameplay is - drawing routes for planes and hoping they don't collide - then there's nothing else that Flight Control can give you.

Luckily, I knew this going in, and with low expectations, they were easily met. Flight Control is only as frustrating as you are incompetent at it. I'm not the most skilled flight controller, but at least I've got the hang of hastily drawing some emergency avoidance paths...

Final Word

There's not much to Flight Control, and you'll likely know if you want to try it out based on what you see. But you should give it a go anyway because it's so easy to get into and understand what it is that you're meant to be doing, yet it's not such a piece of cake that you'll bore of it easily.

This game ramps up, by design, to get harder and harder as more and more planes are successfully landed. On top of that, some map layouts are just harder than others, either because of their literal layout of runways, or the kinds of planes that are trying to land on them - a speedy jet heading towards an aircraft carrier is not the same as a propeller-driven single-seater puttering in to land.

Will you play Flight Control for a long time? Perhaps not, but it's well worth giving it a quick go and seeing if you want more.

Fun Facts

A fast forward button exists and automatically snaps back to normal speed when a collision is imminent. The more I use that fast forward button, the more collision risks I get. Funny, that.

Flight Control, developed by Firemint, first released in 2009.

Version played: Flight Control HD, PC, 2010.