I Am An Air Traffic Controller Airport Hero Haneda

Genre: Simulation

Players: 1

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Review:

The I Am An Air Traffic Controller series has been on multiple platforms over the years, under a few different names. This game, released in 2023 on PlayStation 4 and Nintendo Switch and focusing on Haneda Airport (AKA Tokyo International Airport) in Japan, marks the first time this series has jumped to the current generation of consoles, but interestingly it isn’t the first game by this publisher to hit the Nintendo Switch. In fact, just a year prior, we saw this publisher release Landing Hero Haneda × 787, a similarly-themed game set in the exact same location. However, unlike this series, Landing Hero actually had you flying planes… well, it had you landing (but not taking off with) one type of plane, an odd choice that left the game feeling extremely limited. I Am An Air Traffic Controller, on the other hand, has you directing air traffic from an airport tower.

I previously 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 Haneda 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 some of the detail in the airport (minus a few textures), 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, and the shadows look pretty rough too.

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. And all of that is before you take into account the fact that this game likely just re-uses all of the assets from Landing Hero Haneda!

At such a premium price for such an abysmal amount of content, I cannot possibly recommend Airport Hero Haneda 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. And even those who enjoy this style of game will have to admit that charging a full $50 for a game that re-uses assets from another overpriced game is especially ludicrous – even if the two games were combined (and they really should have been), that price tag would still be despicable.

tl;dr – Airport Hero Haneda is a Simulation-style game that has players directing air traffic in the Haneda Airport (AKA Tokyo 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, which is especially egregious given this game’s use of recycled content.

Grade: D+

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