Flight Control HD (Playstation Network) (2010)

Being a flight controller must feel, in some sense, like being a god; choosing the destiny of hundreds of thousands of lives, whether they live and enjoy paradise or die in a hellish inferno and control where men may fly. If all flight controllers viewed their job as thus, rather than the challenging, demanding, nerve-wrecking occupation where the slightest hiccup can cause massive, irreversible damage that it is, then maybe the suicide rate will drop dramatically. Thankfully, Flight Control HD takes out the months of training, stress and guilt of all the holiday-makers you sent to a slow and melt-y death and trying to use a Arab looking passenger as a scapegoat.

Flight Control HD’s gameplay is, like all casual games, incredibly simplistic, like a cocktail sausage on a stick; you have to draw a path with the analogue stick for planes and helicopters to a airport runway and helipad, and the aircraft are colour-coded and you must direct them to their colour-correlated runway. On offer are nine maps, or “Airfields”, of varying difficulty for your to get the highest score possible, with the game ending when you cause two planes to crash into each other, which can be nerve-wrecking and sphincter-tightening when the screen is full of aircraft of varying speeds and sizes, going in several directions, some piercing the edge of the screen making the odds of them crashing higher. There are some gameplay differences between the maps; an Outback-like map has a plane (probably supposed to be the Royal Flying Doctor Service of Australia) that you have no control over; a map where the wind causes other runways to close then reopen; or one of a tightly cramped military aircraft carrier that rotates slowly as speeding jet fighters need to land. It’s this challenge that adds the satisfying and fulfilling block of cheese to the stick that prevents Flight Control HD from being spectacularly bland.
There’s also four-player co-operative multiplayer which needs a LOT of cooperation, as unorganised players of four can cause a major clusterfuck, which can ruin the fun of both Flight Control HD specifically and multiplayer in general.

The game’s presentation is quite colourful and soothing; the design of the game and levels are cartoonish and very colourful; exceedingly easy on the eyes and while it may not be as technologically advanced as Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, it gets the job done. The music, or should I say the one song that plays in every part of the game, is quite a nice jaunty song, reminiscent of a song you would hear in a standard Pixar film. But if that singular song gets a tad boring or you’re annoyed that in order for the song to repeat it self during a game, you have to switch the music option on-and-off, you can instead play your own music; and it has to be said that playing Iron Maiden while playing the game is something.

If this review is extraordinarily short and very lame, then that’s because there is not much to say about Flight Control HD; it’s an epitome of casual games with quite few gameplay and graphics to mention but tons of playability and more addictive than crystal meth mixed with cocaine and you do get a lot of bang for your buck. It’s nothing special or different, but the same can be said for the numerous Bejeweled clones and sequels and the leviathan blob of tower defence games on the internet and that doesn’t stop them from being enjoyable.

I’m Random Internet Critic and I criticise it because his eyes are ablaze, see the madman in his gaze.