I Am An Air Traffic Controller Airport Hero Centrair 20th Anniversary

Genre: Simulation

Players: 1

.

Review:

Given how extremely niche it is, it’s a wonder that I Am An Air Traffic Controller has been releasing games on a regular basis for as long as it has. Centrair, released in 2024 on Nintendo Switch and focusing on the Chubu Centrair International Airport just South of Nagoya in central Japan, proclaims itself to be the series’ 20th anniversary, though I’m not sure where they’re counting from. The first game to be released under the title of Airport Hero came out on the PlayStation Portable starting in 2006. If we go back further to when the series went under the name Air Traffic Controller, it extends back to a Japan-only release on PC in 1998. So really, you could say this series is anywhere from 18-26 years old by the time this game was released.

Name nitpicking aside, I reviewed three of these games on the Nintendo 3DS, and felt much the same about all of those games – they are all lovingly-crafted Simulation games that are so niche that I can’t imagine them to have a very wide appeal, but I’m sure that players who are interested in this topic must adore them.

Airport Hero Centrair follows very much the same formula. Like all its predecessors, this is a game that doesn’t have you flying any planes, and it isn’t the Arcade style of airport management that has you drawing lines from planes to landing pads. Rather, this is a game that tries to represent with a fair degree of realism the experience of managing and directing traffic in an airport, trying to choose routes and time takeoffs and landings to avoid collisions while getting things done within a reasonable amount of time.

The jump to Nintendo Switch has afforded this series the opportunity to see a significant leap in its presentation, and that certainly shows here… to an extent. The 3D models used for the airplanes, as well as much of the detail in the airport, is absolutely impeccable. What’s more, the lighting is truly wonderful, and there are even nice little details like the heat from the jet exhausts refracting light behind the planes. At its best, this game is visually jaw-dropping.

Unfortunately, “at its best” is something that seems to have been applied here with a fair amount of tunnel vision. The planes and the airport look wonderful, but once you leave the airport, everything else is a terrible mess, with extremely muddy textures for the ground that are sparsely decorated with buildings jutting out, and the water is a repeated tile that’s just plain ugly. What’s more, even the best visual elements of this game suffer from a fair amount of aliasing.

The sound is similarly uneven, though in a way that I think ends up working. See, the sound effects on this game are truly excellent representations of the sounds of the aircraft and airports that are the game’s focus, and the chatter between the airport tower and aircraft over the radio also sounds quite good. The synthesized music on the other hand, while not outright terrible or out-of-place, is very repetitive and starts to get grating before too long. Thankfully, you can opt turn down or to shut off the music entirely, and upon doing so I find this to be a truly engrossing experience.

While Airport Hero Centrair remains faithful (or so I assume) to the processes involved in clearing aircraft for takeoff, clearing them to land, and directing them to the appropriate locations, much of this process is automated. So for example, you don’t need to remember whether you’re contacting tower or control, whether the correct term is “taxi”, or anything like that – for any aircraft ready to accept a command, the appropriate potential commands are brought up based on context. Players must merely decide which of the select commands to send, when to send them, and when it’s appropriate, where to direct the plane to go.

When things are simple and easygoing, this can be a straightforward procedure that’s almost meditative in how relaxing it can be. But when you’re juggling multiple aircraft taking off and leaving, it can be a nerve-wracking experience, wondering if you’ve given the departing aircraft enough time to take off before the next one departs, or worrying if you’ve done the right thing asking a plane to take a holding pattern while you get another one out of the way.

While I do think the presentation here has areas that need improvement, my main complaints for the game are two issues that are tied to each other. On the one hand, you have a topic matter that is extremely niche, to the point where I suspect that very few players will be interested – after all, this is an airplane simulation where you don’t even fly the airplanes. What’s more, it’s a simulation of exactly one airport! That’s taking something niche and making it extraordinarily so!

The other issue is the fact that even though this game is so limited in its content and so niche in its focus, it is still selling for a whopping $50. Honestly, I am astounded. You could have told me that this game was priced at half that amount and I still would have thought it was a bit too expensive.

At such a premium price for such an anemic amount of content, I cannot possibly recommend Airport Hero Centrair to anyone. I suppose that series fans and players who will spend any price to play an air traffic control Simulation will find this to be worth the investment, but everyone else will just feel like they wasted a lot of money.

tl;dr – Airport Hero Centrair is a Simulation-style game that has players directing air traffic in the Chubu Centrair International Airport. While the attention to detail in this game is commendable, that attention doesn’t extend to anything beyond one airport and the planes landing and taking off from it, and despite how niche and lacking in content this game is, the bloated $50 price tag makes this far too expensive for any but the most airport-obsessed players.

Grade: C-

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}

^{This month’s sponsors are Jamie and His Cats, Ben, Ilya Zverev, Andy Miller, Homer Simpin, Johannes, Francis Obst, Gabriel Coronado-Medina, Jared Wark, Kristoffer Wulff, and Seth Christenfeld. Thank you for helping to keep the reviews coming!}