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Hands on with Flight Control for mobile

Exclusive air time with Firemint and Namco’s hotly anticipated conversion

Hands on with Flight Control for mobile
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Firemint’s assault on portable gaming with Flight Control has been as finely orchestrated as a well drilled air traffic control shift.

Having landed the iPhone, DSi, and iPad versions safely it’s the turn of the mobile version to stop circling and begin its approach. We’ve managed to score some exclusive time at the stick.

If you’ve had your head in the clouds for the past year or two, Flight Control tasks you with landing a constant stream of aircraft across four increasingly busy airports. Different aircraft need directing to differed airstrips, and each type moves at its own distinct pace.

This mobile conversion has retained the charming, retro-tinged aesthetic of the original with no discernable loss of detail. Obviously everything’s a bit more cramped on your average portrait-viewed mobile, but it all seems to have been scaled down nicely.

The main question over the conversion is: how on earth will it control? The game was designed firmly with touchscreens in mind, after all.

The answer is: fairly simply with a generous dose of automation.

Selecting which aircraft to direct is a simple case of hitting ‘5’ or ‘okay’ to cycle through them. It’s then a case of drawing the flight path using the D-pad or number keys.

This is a fairly fluid process, and while flight patterns inevitably take on a rather more rigid, angular form than their touchscreen counterparts, the game responds to diagonal inputs and smooths out gradual shifts in direction to roughly match the hand-drawn nature of the original.

When your route nears a landing strip, the game takes over and pulls your flight path into line. It appears to be a necessary concession to the new and really very different control scheme.

As to whether Flight Control mobile retains the original’s compulsive, just-one-more-go playability, you’ll have to wait for our review nearer release.

We're hoping to have some screenshots for you in the near future, so keep your eye out for an update.

Jon Mundy
Jon Mundy
Jon is a consummate expert in adventure, action, and sports games. Which is just as well, as in real life he's timid, lazy, and unfit. It's amazing how these things even themselves out.