ATC 4.0

Imagine being in charge of the lives of hundreds of ordinary people every day. One wrong move, one minute spent absently gazing into a half-filled crossword could mean doom for all of them. Honestly, it's enough to give a lowly game reviewer palpitations.

ATC 4.0 is an air traffic controller game, but thankfully the lives at stake are purely virtual and your flight plans won't be leaving your iPhone or iPod touch. After all, the real job isn't as simple as tapping a touchscreen to make dozens of planes move on your command.

Each of the game's 49 levels have you managing airplanes as they fly through your patch of airspace. You do this by selecting planes and setting waypoints with taps of your finger. Up to three can be set per plane at any point. Once set, they can be moved with a bit more finesse by dragging them.

Each plane has its own intended destination. To start with, it'll just be an area at the centre of each side of the screen. As you progress, more airfields start popping up. Planes can not only take off from these strips, but lots will need to land there too. This is where the dragging of waypoints comes in useful, as the mid-screen runways are tiny, demanding exact flight plans.

There's a toybox-full of other difficulty elements that are introduced and ramped-up pretty steadily through the course of the game, including presidential visits that induce no-fly zones, computer failures that muck up your flight routes, jet fighters that travel a lot faster than the other planes, and even hurricane winds that blow you off course.

All these elements are welcome, moving ATC 4.0's dynamic between a fast fingers action game and a more strategic ballet of planning. We're less happy with the final, but frequently used level modifiers concerning weather.

Some levels are played in sunny daylight, but there are also many played in the night, the snow and rain. This makes sense, yet the difficult ratchets up entirely too much during these atmospheric conditions. If you're playing with less than optimal lighting ATC 4.0 can become unnecessarily frustrating.

Other than this turbulence, it offers a pretty smooth and enjoyable ride. Managing a sky-full of planes is satisfying and indeed tense at times as you struggle not to let any of the planes collide or go off the screen at the wrong place. There are occasions when you'll fluff up a manoeuvre due to the hectic nature of selecting planes and setting waypoints amid a crowded field. Considering quite how fiddly some of the objective are, ATC 4.0 handles things admirably.

The fact that not that much has changed since the 2007 edition of this game yet we're still happy to give this new version a thumbs up shows what a strong, if unlikely, base for a game air traffic controlling is. As long as you're not going to be playing in conditions as extreme as those in the game, ATC 4.0 comes cleared for landing by the Pocket Gamer crew.