Nov 2, 2009 Posted by kinnikun in Featured Articles, Games, Strategy | Comments

Flight Commander – addictive air-traffic controller game for Windows Mobile

Have a strong interest in airplanes? Ever wanted to direct planes to land safely? Or maybe you like seeing pandemonium on your Windows Mobile screen? Lucky for you, the developers of Tower Defense have introduced a new touch screen game that fits the bill, titled Flight Commander. The game is simple in nature, but very entertaining. This review will give you an idea of what you can expect out of this fun game.

Flight Commander’s gameplay is easy to explain; you guide multiple planes with your finger or stylus to land without causing crashes. That’s the gist of it, but let’s start with square one. As soon as I started Flight Commander, I knew it would be another interesting game from Color Stone Ltd. The main menu has a nice UI and plays realistic airport terminal PA sounds in the background. The sounds play in different languages, so it really does feel like you’re in an international airport. The speaker talks about baggage claim, passenger boarding and other random bits. This amusing audio feature is worth noting because it sets the mood before entering the actual game.

You have several options from the main menu: highscore, tutorial, resume, and start. The highscore menu is an easy way to keep track of all your scores, which is a great method of challenging yourself in any game. The tutorial screen has basic information on how to play the game. This screen could have had another page that explained some of the gameplay options, which we’ll discuss further in the review. The resume option gives you a chance to go back to the last game played (saves every game when exiting). So if you’re dominating the game, but have to stop for any reason, you can always go back and continue playing later on in the day (great feature!). One thing you have probably noticed from the screenshots is that the menus are slightly risqué, especially the tutorial screen (see screenshot gallery). We don’t mind, but if you plan on letting young children play the game, you may want to avoid that screen. As Windows phones mature and evolve with finger friendly goodness, more and more kids are going to start owning these great devices, so we thought we’d give a warning just in case.

Flight Commander has unique cartoon-like graphics with its bubbly menus, icons, and backgrounds. The styling works well for this kind of game. The sound FX are loud and compliment the graphics nicely, but that’s all you get for in-game audio. It would be even nicer if we could turn on or off in-game background music. You will probably be too involved with the on-screen antics to even care about music though.

The most important part of the game is, of course, the gameplay. As I mentioned above, the main object of the game is to land planes and other aircraft without crossing paths. You get a small notification icon at the edge of the screen when new planes are about to enter the field. Once a craft is on the screen, tap and hold their likeness to drag them wherever you want. Dragging a plane across the screen will lay down a flight path for it to automatically follow. You want to eventually guide it to a landing strip where it will land and give you points for succeeding (1 per craft). Planes that get too close to each other will turn red to alert you of the danger. The developers have made controlling these crafts very easy and responsive. As soon as you tap one of the planes, it starts moving in the direction that you have mapped. You can also reroute them at any time. Sometimes I like to make one plane circle around in the corner of the screen just for giggles, but rerouting can also come in handy when you need to keep planes out of the way. You will know if you have linked a plane correctly to a landing path because the route will turn green. It sounds easy, which it is at first, but you have to worry about more and more planes on the screen at the same time as time progresses. It can become one big mess if you don’t route them strategically and quickly as they will crash into each other if you fail to do so.

Some of the aircraft models that I’ve seen during gameplay are seaplanes, passenger airliners, Stealth Fighters and two different helicopters. They vary in speed and can’t all land in the same spots either. For instance, seaplanes need to land on water, airliners should land on runways, and helicopters are designated to helipads. This adds another level of difficulty when multiple crafts are in the air.

There are several game options available. Before you start the game, you can select how many crashes are allowed before you get the dreaded gameover menu. The default is 1, but newcomers should increase it to the max of 4 until they get used to the game. There are two game modes, emergency and airjam. Emergency is my preferred gameplay mode because it introduces additional factors into the game. These include uncontrollable aircrafts that are set on a predetermined landing path and random flying objects that could collide with your planes. For the life of me, I could not figure out what airjam addds to the mix (let us know if notice anything!) Finally, there are two maps available. We would’ve liked more, but it’s a new game so maybe there are some new stages planned for updates.

Overall, Flight Commander is a nice looking and challenging game. The simplistic and addictive qualities of the game bring back fond memories of playing a game called Pilot Wings for Super Nintendo and Nintendo64. If you’re looking for a game that will keep you busy while you wait for time to pass, this is it. Like its cousin, Tower Defense, you will have a hard time putting it down.

Flight Commander for Windows Mobile is a very similar experience to what you would get with the iPhone and Nintendo DSi’s Flight Control games. Unfortunately we are not good with video reviews and couldn’t get a video of the app ( If you think you can help us with this issue feel free to Contact Us ). But here is a bunch of screenshots for you to drool over

Minimum Requirements: WindowsMobile 6.x with VGA or WVGA screen and OpenGL ES support (most devices released after 2007).

Tested on: Touch Pro2 (WVGA) it was perfect. On a Touch Pro (VGA custom WM6.5 ROM), it lagged and had glitches.
Update : The developer got back to us saying it might have been an issue with opengl es driver issue in that ROM. They said they have tested it with TouchPro and it worked well.

Pros:

• Nice cartoon GFX
• Realistic background sounds for main menu
• Fun and addictive
• Additional game modes
• Simple enough to pick up, challenging enough to keep you playing
• Keeps score
• Ability to save game
• Speed up or pause action

Cons:

• Price
• No trial/demo!!! Unacceptable for an expensive game
• Only two maps
• Creates shortcut if installed to main memory, but not if you install to storage card
• Limited device support (no QVGA )

Possible Improvements:

• Maybe allow for saving of more than the last game
• Background music could be a good addition (option to turn on/off though)
• 2 maps could get old, at least another should be included

Unfortunately this game has not made it to the stores yet and this was an exclusive look at the game. Big thanks to Color Stone Ltd for giving us a copy for reviewing it. Now the good news we can give 2 lucky readers a copy of this amazing game. See 1800PocketPC.com for details on how to enter the contest. [ Closes on the 7th Nov ( Melbourne time ) ]

Update [ 01/12/09 ] : The Game can be Purchased from Handango

Tags: Color Stone Ltd, Flight Commander

blog comments powered by Disqus