I Am an Air Traffic Controller: Airport Hero Osaka-KIX

Genre: Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

Airport Hero Osaka-KIX, released on Nintendo 3DS in 2017, is the fourth and as of this writing final 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 predecessors, so I have copied over most of those reviews 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 extremely repetitive synthesized music. 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 Osaka-KIX is an extremely niche game that will not be for everyone. It’s extremely slow-paced (the story mode, which replaces the earlier games’ tutorial, even has a fast-forward, but players can’t do this in the main game), and technical (though not complicated). Thankfully this time around the game does a much better job indicating where runways and taxi routes are as you select them, so any collisions you cause are harder to dismiss as anything other than your own fault. 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 Osaka-KIX. 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 Osaka-KIX 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, and it even improves slightly on the prior two games, making this the best of the series, if only marginally.

Grade: C+

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