Radar love
The final screen you have to monitor is the airborne radar screen. It shows the airport, the arrival paths to the runways and the concentric mileage rings for distance reference. If you thought that you were just going to be sending aircraft into the air, well that is only half the job. You also have to fit in arrivals which includes taxiing them to their gate. At some of the airports in the game like Miami and Los Angeles that can get tricky and I found myself with more than one Mexican standoff on a taxiway.
Once in the air you have to care for them long enough to hand them off to a radar controller. At MIA and LAX that is easy, it’s a simple hand-off, in St. Thomas you have to issue several heading changes to follow a departure procedure.
Oops! I taxied one to line up and wait on the runway at F1 intersection but forgot to redirect the plane that taxied out before it to the same intersection and it went to the end of the runway and cleared it for takeoff. Rearend collision and minus 500 points.
Successful air traffic control like flying is all about managing your distractions. If you keep up your scan from the taxiways, to the runways, to the radar display, you will be successful. While the game is almost 90% realistic there were some shortcomings. The sound effects were not up to par. While the designers took the time to use panning to simulate planes flying from one side of the game to the other they all sounded like the same plane, and a poor representation at that. Large airliners do not sound the same as turboprops, yet in this game they did.
Nose to Nose
In single player mode you pick one runway at a time to control. At LAX with its two sets of parallel runways the terminal is in the middle of the two runway sets and all aircraft have to taxi to whatever runway you chose. There is only one taxiway that connects the two sides and that makes the taxiways rather crowded when trying to move newly arrived aircraft back to a gate on the far side of the airport while one is taxiing to take off from that same side.
The game does not allow you to use the other set of parallel runways or taxiways to route traffic. Also annoying is that some taxiways off of the active runway you chose to control were not available for use limiting the pavement available to you when trying to thread departure and arrival taxi traffic around each other.
This makes it especially challenging and is one of the small departures the game takes away from the real world. The other frustration in single player mode is that I could not switch an arriving aircraft to its adjacent parallel runway if things were getting crowded. That would also not happen in the real world.
I did like how the game starts slow with some easy to manage traffic, before it picks up to a crescendo of planes taxiing, taking off, and arriving at a frenetic pace, just like at the major hubs across the U.S. during their periodic daily traffic rushes.
The user manual was very readable and logical in its approach. It provided simple examples of how to play the game with keyboard commands and with voice recognition. I know the language of ATC and as pilots we are always taught to use standard phraseology, but slang always creeps in. In Tower! 2011 you can’t be a smooth talking controller, you must speak properly! The manual also included an extensive and readable section on the philosophy of ATC to guide the player on how best to be successful.
This game is also built for those who want to make their own airports and planes to fly to and from them. The game comes with an airplane and airfield editor, along with an extensive section in the manual for those who want to develop their one scenarios.
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