Flying the stressful skies
SOUND: Again not the strongest category, but ATC does well at conveying the sense of being in a airport control tower. Background chatter over the radio. Sounds of planes touching down or taking off. The BGM can be a little annoying after 20 minutes though and unfortunately there is no option to turn it off.
GAMEPLAY: Pretty simple. You're an air traffic controller tasked with landing and departing airplanes from busy airports without causing "chaos".
The complexity of this game lies in the balancing of arriving and departing flights. You can have at anytime a maximum of 4 arriving flights and 4 departing flights. Juggling 8 flights through 1 runway and 4 gates is very challenging and in the lies the fun. At anytime you must be watchful of how fast planes are moving in the holding pattern to avoid mid-air collisions and must adjust their speeds accordingly.
Also you must keep an eye on the ground making sure planes aren't taxiing on the runway where you just gave another plane permission to land, which will cause a game ending ground collision screen. Taxiing more then one plane on the runway will also cause this. Some larger airports in the game have a domestic and international runway. You must be sure of which flight you are sending to what, because landing the wrong one will make big problems.
Each flight has a stress meter that rises when they are in a holding pattern to long or are delayed at the gate. Once that meter fills up, it's game over.
It can be chaotic and overwhelming at first, but once you get into a groove you'll almost feel like a symphony orchestrator in a ballet of air and steel. Brilliant!
OVERALL: If you like strategy/puzzle/management games or ever had a passing interest in being an air traffic controller, definitely check this game out! And while not the deepest game on the DS it's certainly one of the more enjoyable.