Airport Madness: World Edition is an extremely addictive air traffic control strategy game that will have you pulling your hair out at times–and that’s half the fun.
This is not a full-blown Air Traffic Control simulator, as some of the negative reviews on Steam are more than happy to point out. If you’re looking for something like that, you’d be better off with something like Global ATC Simulator. Instead, this is an arcade-style ATC game that greatly simplifies the types of planes, airports and other options, and is both fun and frustrating as it ramps up the number of things it expects you to keep track of and manage.
The game starts out simply enough with a variety of planes slowly flying approaching from off-screen. When planes appear, they are automatically assigned a runway for landing. For each plane in the air, you can either leave it alone and let it land on that runway, or you can assign it a different runway, have it speed up or slow down, or divert it by clicking on the plane and dragging your mouse in the direction you want it to fly temporarily while you deal with other problems.
Once a plane lands, the player has to give it instructions on when it is safe to cross runways, and then tell it when to line-up and take off.
There are only five plane types, but you also have to for the difference in speed between the slow prop planes vs. the much faster jets
By the time you’ve got four planes in the air all wanting to land at the same time you’ve got a backlog of eight planes on the ground all refueled and wanting to take off, this gets to be a nerve wracking level of information overload that is fun as hell to try to manage.
The developer is actively supporting the game by regularly adding new airports. When the game launched on Steam it featured eight airports, but the developer has added two new airports since and is working on a third for December 2015.
And at just US$9.99 on Steam, Airport Madness: World Edition is an excellent value.
