Flight Control (2010)

The presentation is certainly polished. But the game is pretty much a one trick pony, so everything hinges on the core game mechanic, which just wasn't addictive enough to sustain my interest very long. There's nothing wrong with a game based one mechanic, in fact most casual games do, but it better be damn good if you want serious replay value. "Easy to Learn, Hard to Master" is nothing new, it's been around long before video games. Think about those carnival games that seem so easy to win you have to keep trying. A game like Tetris only has one mechanic, but there is something so satisfying about it that you keep coming back. It doesn't need story, or characters; it survives on gameplay alone.

Flight Control works well at first. Drawing the flight path for incoming air traffic is very effective on the iPad. Eventually the number of planes and their speed increases, to the point where mayhem takes over and you can't keep up any more. Good in theory, but the problem is somewhat intangible. As the each game ramps up it's difficulty, I was often left feeling as though from game to game I wasn't really getting that much better. There is a large element of luck that plays into how long you can sustain each attempt. So you would finish a game thinking, "I don't know how I would have done that any better", and so you go play something else. The reason casual games succeed is because they leave you feeling like you were so close to succeeding but just missed, and you'll get it on the next try...which leads to the next try, and so on. I never quite got that feeling from Flight Control. Truthfully the developers have created the very best game they could with this mechanic; it's about as polished as it can be. But all that only turns out to be window dressing if the gameplay isn't compelling enough to hook you.