Land It! Review – Xbox One

One of my favorite iOS games of all time is this little ATC title called Flight Control (or Flight Control HD on iPad). I’ve had this game on four generations of iPhone and three generations of iPad and have logged hundreds of hours landing airplanes, so when I heard about Land It! I was obviously intrigued…right up to the minute I started playing it.  It’s sad really, because Land It! has all the basic elements of the iOS game that obviously inspired it but fails miserably due to some of the worst controls in Xbox history.

Even before I had completed the tutorial, I knew something wasn’t quite right about this game. I struggled through the first world of maps, playing most levels multiple times just to finish, and even when I did what I thought was a perfect run was still earning only two of the three possible stars – another throwback to mobile gaming.  The game starts off simple enough with a single airstrip and a few planes, and fiendishly lures you in with a few easy victories.  An hour later you have six planes flying around the screen stacking up to land while trying to avoid a hot air balloon festival, and you find your arm cocked back ready to throw your controller at something.

The reason Flight Control worked was for the simple element of drawing flight plans with your finger. In that game you could create elaborate paths for planes to follow then move on to other planes knowing that previous planes would not hit a mountain, leave the map, or smash into a balloon.  Tap and draw was fast, intuitive and most importantly accurate.  In Land It! you use the right stick to arbitrarily point and hopefully pick the plane you want to control – and exercise in frustration than rises with the number of planes on the screen.  If you have a plane about to hit a mountain and one or two planes are between it and your current plane, you have to keep tapping the stick to get there – there is no instant plane access.

Once your plane is highlighted you can control its speed with the triggers and its path with the left stick. But unlike Flight Control, the path you create in this game is fairly linear forcing you to constantly revisit and readjust every plane’s course numerous times until it is off the screen.  So not only are you the air traffic controller you are also the pilot of sometimes up to six planes at once.  I might be able to do that with touch controls but not with this janky gamepad scheme.

There are so many cool ideas implemented here that I really wanted this game to work, and I hope they actually put this on iOS because this could easily be my new addiction for three more generations of mobile gaming. I liked landing the plane and having to wait while passengers boarded before taking off and freeing up the runway for the next plane to land – even though this makes no sense in the real world.  The air traffic lanes with jumbo jets and “no fly zones” were also a nice touch, and there were some really cool navigational levels where you simply had to get planes from one edge of the screen to another without colliding.

I adored all the little animations on the map; cars driving, boats kicking up a wake on the water, or even little tractors plowing up the farmlands. The game has a pleasingly innocent soundtrack and minimal sound effects – actually not enough sound effects as there needed to be better and more advanced alerts for proximity warnings.  Beeping two seconds before I smack a mountain is pointless when it takes me two seconds to even switch planes and another 3-5 to adjust speed and direction.  My favorite effects was landing a jet and hearing the whining of a prop engine.  I’m not sure if this was an error or homage to the movie, Airplane.

$14 is a bit much for what is basically the same game you can play on mobile for less than $5, and the concept and gameplay actually work on mobile. The controls for Land It! are complete rubbish, which totally destroys any chance you have of enjoying what would otherwise be a fun little ATC arcade game.  Thanks to this game flying is no longer the safest way to travel.

Screenshot Gallery


Author: Mark Smith
I've been an avid gamer since I stumbled upon ZORK running in my local Radio Shack in 1980. Ten years later I was working for Sierra Online. Since then I've owned nearly every game system and most of the games to go with them. Not sure if 40+ years of gaming qualifies me to write reviews, but I do it anyway.

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