Review: Doodle Control HD – Better Than Flight Control?
by Allan Curtis
March 9, 2011
Overview
Doodle Control is a new take on the well known game, Flight Control. You use your finger to draw paths to guide planes to the airport without crashing them into each other. Doodle Control however brings a new graphical style and purchasable aircraft into the mix.
Features
Doodle Control features a neat hand drawn graphical style, classic path drawing gameplay, and a shop where you can buy more aircraft to play with, and Game Center support.
The Good
If you’ve played Flight Control, you will feel instantly at home with Doodle Control. It is fundamentally the same game with a few differences. You have one or more airports on the screen, and planes, helicopters, or flying saucers appear. You must touch and drag a safe path for them to their airport. Helicopters must land on their pad and planes are color coded and must land on their airfield. New planes are constantly released into the playfield, so you must quickly plot a route for them without them crashing into each other. Like Flight Control, you can change an aircraft’s path at any time, so it’s easy to react to new incoming aircraft or a collision you didn’t predict. This is enjoyable, at least on normal or hard, where the game constantly adds new planes until you’re beset by aircraft. You’ll have your hands full dealing with all of them. The easy difficulty is really for people new to a touch screen, as even somebody who hasn’t played the original Flight Control will have no real problems. Planes move slowly and only a few planes appear at once. Normal and hard mode not only add more aircraft and airports, but aircraft move much faster, making the game much harder and forcing quick thinking.
Besides its fast-paced gameplay, Doodle Control also features purchasable aircraft. As you land planes, you acquire cash that you can use to buy new aircraft. New helicopters, planes and saucers are available. Some can be landed at any airport, some are faster than earlier planes and all are worth increasing amounts of cash when you land them, so you can easily afford most expensive planes. This is a great idea and it motivates you to play so you can unlock new planes. Faster planes also make the game more intense and varied.
Graphically speaking, Doodle Control looks very nice. It has charming, hand drawn backgrounds with vibrant colors. Aircraft are easy to tell apart and feature some cute designs, like UFOs and stealth planes. New planes looks very different from earlier ones and the game as a whole has a great look that will appeal to kids and adults alike.
The Bad
Although the graphics are nice, with regard to sound, the game could be better. The arrival of new aircraft is signaled by a loud beeping sound, which gets annoying and feels out of place with the game’s otherwise warm vibe. The cash register sound for landing place is a bit better, but the music could be more varied. While the music is by no means annoying, it isn’t really as good as Flight Control’s music and there could also be more than one song.
Unfortunately, Doodle Control also features somewhat poor touch controls. Quite often when you try to drag a plane, you’ll place your finger on it and start to drag, only to have the game not register it and not draw a path. You then have to put your finger on the plane again, hold it for a second and then draw. This usually fixes the problem. This is rather annoying, as not only do you have to repeat actions, you can also lose a game from a crash you tried to avoid. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen often enough to ruin the game.
The Verdict
Doodle Control is a cute game with familiar, addictive gameplay, good add-ons to keep you playing, and a reasonable price for the gameplay offered. It’s just a slight shame the controls can be somewhat iffy. If you love the original Flight Control, you’ll love Doodle Control HD. And for those new to path drawing gameplay, the easy mode coupled with the extra features over Flight Control make Doodle Control a no brainier. Recommended!
