itsmyiPad Review: Flight Command HD

Flight Command for iPhone is one of my favourite games on the Apple App Store and so I was really looking forward to playing the new, super-sized iPad version, Flight Command HD!  I can’t confess to being able to get anything like the belief-defying high scores of some players (if you need proof that some people have way too much time on their hands, go here) but many a happy coffee break, train ride, bedtime hour has been whiled away trying to land little planes on little runways.

Interestingly, Flight Command HD is a different game to its phone-sized predecessor.  The aircraft are the same size and scale as in the original, so you now have a much larger area to control your planes.  But as a consequence, there are more runways and more aircraft to manage: the default runway has two types of helicopter, runways for seaplanes and blue cargo aircraft, in addition to the red jet airliners and yellow Cessna planes.

Landing the aircraft requires you to drag flight paths without bringing the planes into collision, but now as different aircraft approach each other, you get a cool, intersecting vector line warning  to flag the imminent danger.  By dragging a path and tapping the screen, you can also direct airplanes to a point in the airspace marked by a solid colour dot.  This is really handy on the iPad screen because, unlike the iPhone version, it’s hard to look at the entire map at take everything  in at one glance.  You have to look up and around to focus on different planes in other quadrants and this distraction makes for more challenging gameplay.  For me, it creates a very different gaming experience to the original iPhone and that’s why I think Flight Command HD is a very worthy successor to the original Firemint success story and extends the franchise on the new iPad platform.

Read other reviews on the Firemint website