Landing Hero Haneda × 787

Genre: Flight Sim

Players: 1

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Review:

Landing Hero Haneda × 787 (from here on referred to simply as Landing Hero) is a very peculiar game. Released exclusively on Nintendo Switch in 2022, Landing Hero is a Flight Simulator where you only control the plane during landing sequences. What’s more, you will only ever be landing in one location – Haneda Airport (AKA Tokyo International Airport) in Japan. And as the title indicates, you will only be piloting one kind of plane, the Boeing 787 (albeit without Boeing’s name or licensing being used). Needless to say, this is a very specific type of Flight Simulator for a very specific sort of person.

That specific sort of person had better not be looking for good graphics, either, because they won’t find any here. Airport Hero’s 3D graphics depict Tokyo as largely flat and featureless, save for perhaps the airport itself, a structure in the water, and Mount Fuji off to the side. Tokyo, one of the world’s largest cities, is depicted with nothing more than a blurry texture on a flat stretch of ground. What’s more, while the game does have a model for your plane and the inside cockpit, you will never see it while playing the game – gameplay just has you looking at a HUD designed for the game, and the actual plane and cockpit views can only be accessed in replays.

The sound fares a tad bit better, with appropriate air traffic chatter as you’re landing, although the game is played with this odd elevator music in the background that… works, I suppose, but it’s odd, nonetheless.

As for the gameplay, what’s here works, if you’re a part of the aforementioned narrow target audience. The game starts you off going through rings and gently telling you each step along the way, though it doesn’t exactly make it clear how the multiple redundant controls differ. Once you’ve completed a level, you can play it again with the training wheels off, landing without any of the guides.

Given that this game’s premise is already highly restrictive, it’s disappointing that even once you account for this, the game is even more limited. There are no landings at night, no landings in the rain, the only differences in the levels seem to be your direction and the wind. Other differences, like time of day and clarity, seem like only cosmetic changes – even cloudy skies don’t really seem to alter your visibility.

Non-combat Flight Simulators are already a pretty niche genre, and Flight Sims with poor graphics are even more niche. But once you take a Flight Sim and narrow it down to such a specific tiny part of that already-niche genre, and then proceed to make even that part as tiny as possible… I can’t help but wonder if you’ve created a game so niche that the only people who will ever play it are reviewers like me.

At $30, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to buy Landing Hero, and even when this game goes on sale for $2, I can’t help but think that most players will feel like that $2 was wasted on a game that seems like it’s designed to cater to one random retired Japanese pilot who only plays games on his Nintendo Switch. That guy may very well love this game, but for the rest of us, this is not worth bothering with.

tl;dr – Landing Hero is a Flight Simulator that is extremely niche in its focus – players pilot only one type of plane, flying into only one airport, and they only control the landing of the plane, not takeoff or mid-flight. Add to this some terrible graphics, pathetically scarce options, and a laughably bloated $30, and it’s hard to imagine anyone finding this game worth buying. Even when this game goes on sale for $2, I think this is only going to be a waste of $2.

Grade: D-

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