Flight Control review

Although not quite up there with spaceman and cowboy, air traffic controller is an aspirational role. Really though, why would you want the job? It's high stress, even higher pressure, and have you seen what happens to them in films? Yep, they're usually the guys who don't manage to save the day, through no fault of their own, leaving the hero to claim all the glory.

Thankfully, Flight Control drops the stress-induced mental health problems and hair loss of the real job in favour of all-out fun. Yes, it's still game over if you let two planes collide, but it's your high score that's in jeopardy rather than the lives of innocents.

Flight Control charges you with planning out the flight paths of helicopters, jets and airbuses as they near the runway. Doing so is as simple as you could imagine- all you do is drag your finger along the screen, making a dotted white line that trails the path of the plane.

In each of the three included maps there are different landing strips and helipads for the various types of aircraft. For a short while, it seems fairly simple too. The planes fly in, one after the other, in fairly orderly fashion, leaving you to simply file them away back to terra firma.

Things soon descend into chaos though, with fast planes shooting in just after painfully slow helicopters, and waves of a handful of passenger jets appearing all at once. The best part about Flight Control is that when these manic moments occur, they're never scripted, but instead are down to some devilish algorithms at the game's core that never fail to challenge and amuse.

It's this sense of carefully calculated randomness that helps to instil the all-important ‘one more go' factor into Flight Control. A game that relies on your lust for high scores rather than offering satisfaction through traditional linear progression, it's worrying easy to return to for that ‘one more go' until long after the sun's gone to bed.

This element of crafted simplicity is carried on into the game's style too. Using block colours and character graphics that evoke the golden age of consumer flight, back when neither riff nor raff would be allowed down the gangway, Flight Control has an effortless charm that only helps to shoehorn you back into the addictive cycle of actually playing the game.

Flight Control isn't an ambitious game of design statements and intricacies that can go unnoticed unless you play it with your eyes proverbially peeled. It is, however, very good and very, very addictive.