I Am an Air Traffic Controller: Airport Hero Narita

Genre: Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Airport Hero Narita, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2015, is the third game in the I Am an Air Traffic Controller series. This series of games is a straight-laced Simulation-style game where players take on the role of an air traffic controller, directing takeoffs and landings and trying to avoid a collision. I should note that this game is extremely similar to its predecessor, Airport Hero Hawaii, so I have copied over most of that review here.

To be clear, by “straight-laced”, I mean that this is not one of those games where you’re drawing lines to determine a flight path. Rather, you’re telling planes which runway to land on, which route to take to taxi between runways, handing over control between different parts of air traffic control. Largely you’ll be highlighting a specific plane and selecting from a small group of options at a time. Much of this is contextual – when a plane is ready to be taxid, you’ll be shown multiple taxi routes to choose from, when the plane is waiting at the runway, you’ll have the option to tell them to standby or clear them for takeoff, and so on.

The lengths that this game goes to for the sake of its simulation is pretty impressive. At every step of the way, the planes and control tower will be trading messages you can hear voiced over the radios, the plane sounds seem authentic, and these are backed by some music that sounds like… well, hold music. Not exactly immersive. Players may want to lower the volume of that music anyway to hear more of the sounds – it adds to the realism of the simulation (though the heavily-accented voice work does detract from this a bit).

The graphics in this game are also quite nice, for the most part, making use of some pretty detailed 3D visuals, though the textures for the ground seem a bit blurry and low-resolution, and the texture for the ocean seems flat and repetitive. On the other hand, the planes themselves look wonderful, and the lighting at different times of day looks quite nice too.

I should note that there’s also a game mode here where players can take a photo with the Nintendo 3DS camera to generate a scenario on the fly for the game. The map is still exactly the same, but weather and wind, time of day, and the flights arriving and departing will apparently be determined by the type of picture you take. This is… well, a pretty odd feature, but it’s an interesting addition that does add some replay value.

Really, the biggest complaints I have about this game are simply due to what it is. Quite simply, Airport Hero Narita is an extremely niche game that will not be for everyone. It’s extremely slow-paced (the tutorial even has a fast-forward, but players can’t do this in the main game), technical (though not complicated), and it seems to assume that players will instinctively know the numbers of all of the runways and taxi routes. You cannot simply assign two different routes to two different planes and assume they won’t collide, you have to either instinctively know where everything is (without the game indicating this to you), or you have to babysit these planes as they move around to ensure they don’t collide, giving commands well in advance with the knowledge that these big machines won’t just stop on a dime. Oh, and if they do collide, prepare to be disappointed – there’s no explosion, the game freezes before the planes even come into contact with one another.

Simply put, most players will probably not enjoy Airport Hero Narita. It’s one of the most niche games I’ve ever played, and it’s painfully slow. However, if you happen to be that rare example of someone who’s thrilled by the thought of a realistic air traffic control Simulation, this game may well be exactly what you want.

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tl;dr – Airport Hero Narita is an air traffic controller Simulation that has players sending orders to planes arriving and departing a Japanese airport. This is a fairly realistic simulation, which makes for a dreadfully slow-paced and technical game that I think the overwhelming majority of players will not find to their liking. But if you’re the rare sort of person who craves a realistic air traffic control simulation, this game may well be exactly what you’ve been craving.

Grade: C+

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