Gonna start by saying I love this game but after playing for a good few hours now there are some nagging issues. I can recommend the game itself but not at this price.

First off, love the feeling of been in a control tower with monitors and such directing the planes with my voice. Really cool game and I have a lot of fun with it.

Some of my issues:

1 - The price. Its basically the same mechanics as the last game (Tower 3D Pro) with some improvements (mainly the graphics), which is great to see but I haven't noticed a great deal that justifies the almost AAA price.

2 - No Save System - So far i have noticed the missions are 2 hour and 4 hour shifts. There is time compression but its tough to use it when its busy. A two hour shift with time compression took me 1 hour 20 mins to complete. How you can justify the price and not have a save function in when you expect people play for 3-4 hours in one sitting is beyond me. Update - Apparently there is a save system now which is great news.

3 - Real Colour and Real Traffic - In the game the companies are fake and the planes don't have real life colours, you can get the real ones but this is by paying almost the same price as the game to get them. No idea how they can justify cosmetics to be this price. Why would the developers encourage this, do they really think the people who make the cosmetics deserve to be paid the same as the ones who actually made the game?

4 - The coming DLC - There are a few airports (I think I have seen 3 or 4 so far) and the devs have said more (free) are coming. But then I see a "Store" option on the main menu that is greyed out most likely for future paid airports. Going by what they have charged for Tower 3D Pro I can imagine they wont be cheap, plus the company who makes the real colours have another charge for that airport. If you wanted to buy Tower3D Pro plus all the DLC it would be over £500 and thats without the Real Colour add ons. Just seems a little out of order.

Side note: I am aware they are a small company and I understand the argument of having to put the price up to sustain themselves but honestly I think the prices hurt the game more. If this were priced reasonably I would expect there would be a lot more sales.

Tower 3D pro all time player peak on steam is 123 6 years ago.

Tower Simulator 3 all time player peak is 117 and it only came out a couple weeks ago.

Feel like if this was lower priced the sales would be a lot higher.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXOOrBFu-TCCo54alMlmSSnr6qOuA2X9c


Update - Seems I was accurate about the DLC, currently over £300 to purchase all of them! Ridiculous.

Another Update (8-11-24)
DLC cost comes to over £400 now

Since I am a real ATCO (TWR and APP) and I spent about 150h playing Tower3D, I was really exited to try out this game. I have also bought Real Traffic, so some points of this review may reffer to that. Unfortunately, it turned out to be much much worse than Tower3D.

I am gonna point out the good things about this game at first (compared to Tower3D):
- Better graphics (yet, not as good as showed in trailer... but you can work with that).
- You have more commands available, which makes it easier to control aircraft.
- Real Traffic has updated database of airlines and schedules (no more Alitalia nor GermanWings flights, for example).
- Different accents of pilots.
- Option to read numbers in callsign as double digits (instead of AAL1-2-3-4 you can now use AAL12-34). Something the American ATCOs would enjoy. Since I am from EU, I don't really care, since we need to read every number separately.

What is worse compared to Tower3D:
- Your personalized settings. I am using 3 screens. I always have to open new windows and set everything like I am playing the game for the very first time. In Tower3D you just opened the game and every screen was on exactly the same position as the session before (which is btw quite real - you just tap your ID on your ATC position and it immediately sets all screens to your personalized settings).
- Surveillance screens in general. You were not able to see all TWY designators in Tower3D (but at least the vast majority of them was visible). Now you cannot. So without a Jeppesen chart, you are basically lost.
- Wind indicator. I am surprised that the wind direction indicator has been removed. You only get the wind direction with no direction indication. Again, in reality you have both. Either you get wind direction expressed in numbers (let's say 360 degrees) or wind direction indicator (the arrow).
- Taxi speed. Have you ever seen an aircraft taxiing at about 80kt? No? Just feel free to play this game.
- Using heavy/super at the end of the callsign. This would actually be a good feature, if done correctly. Heavy or super is used by ATCO only on the very first contact with an ACFT. In some countries, it is also necessary to use it during takeoff clearance. But that's it. There is no ATCO in the world that would use heavy/super during taxi clearance. Rubish.

Things that are bad and were bad in Tower3D as well:
- The things developers call ADIRS and DBRITE are something completely different.
- Still missing the option to issue RWY crossing clearance during initial taxi clearance.
- You are still not allowed to move ACFT labels.

Bugs encountered so far:
- Weather does not work. I get empty ATIS no matter what my settings are. Even during thunderstorm, ATIS shows wind calm.
- One ACTF just touches down. The other one is on 4NM final. Yet I got runway incursion warning. When I clicked OK, I immediately got another one. And so on, so on, as long as I lost all points gained during that session.

Overall, the experience is much much worse than Tower3D. Tower3D was something around 6/10 imo (not caring about graphics). This game would be 2,5/10 at the highest. THIS GAME IS JUST A HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT SO FAR. The developers really need guidance and education in aviation, because, at this time, it seems they are cute aviation enthusiasts, but in reality know exactly nothing about actual ATC.
The developers' claim that this game is used by real ATCOs for training purposes must be a plain lie. Nothing more. I would run a mile from the aerodrome where someone who based their training on this game works.

Worth the money? No! No! No!

This game is a lovely game. Medicore graphics for a simulator of this day in age but the gameplay is so much fun. Though there are infact more cons than there are pros. 1. The price: The price for the game is outrages, $60 dollars for this game. You are telling me that this game is the same quality of a game as Microsoft flight simualator! The base game and this game are the exact same prices. Further more for a single airport it cost $15 dollars. There are 30 additional airports. Which after now double checking is over 4x! The amount of airports provided in the base game with it's dissapointing only 6! Now, you would expect a game with same price as Microsoft flight simulator to have decent quantity of things but unfortuantely that is not the case. Just to have real airlines on the planes you are operating it would cost you an additional $45 dollars! (including world traffic) but for some reason the world colour addon required the world traffic to be installed too for it to function properly but the world colour addon is sold sperately and Nyergers design, the company behind the addon did a really poor job with emphasizing that fact. Saying in a couple of other steam views that they should've made it clearer but they never changed it and it was too late for me. I bought it for $30 dollars couldn't figure out how to install it since to install it you need to install it on their personal website and for some reason it isn't a steam dlc. Though I am very sure there is a good reason for that. So, I requested a refund and it stated the refund should be done within 3-5 buissness days. 9 buissness days later it is still not refunded and I decided to go buy the bundle with both world colour and traffic installed. Though 48 hours later I still can't figure out how to install it and the support team has still not reached back to me yet about how to do it. 2. Gameplay: The voice recognizion system is very buggy requiring little to no accents and a monotional voice in order for it to pick up. The commands are quite limited and are simplifed much more compared to the actual commands that the real ATC uses. Also, the wind commands at least of this being posted doesn't really do anything at all which I am highly dissapointed by. Another thing is that the saving systems are really bad. I tried to save it on my 4 hour extended career but when I reloaded the save file all of my previous planes were deleted and my point counter (you get 100 points for a successful take off/landing) was reseted to 0 though all of the current planes were still there. So I would not suggest buying this game as of this current state unless there is a major sale which maybe even not unless we are looking at over a 75% discount then I would think about it but definantlty not at this current price.
Though with the new update 5.0 the game has significantly improved with multiple changes to the textures and added a couple of new airports for free which is quite nice. The modeling of the game has also significantly improved. I would still not recommend it but if you were thinking about it really hard before the update. It might be a possible option for you <3 I have also started to experience an odd glitch where the livery of a plane doesn't match up with the callsign. Such as for DAL4492 has an Republic livery?
So would I suggest you buy this? Well for a simple ATC simulator this is one of only a few on the market, with debatably the best graphics. But if you really want to simulate an actual ATC experience, I would highly suggest VATSIM. VATSIM is a modifer on games such as Microsoft Flight Simulator which lets you talk to ACTUAL people who are playing as ATC or playing as PILOTS. All of the callsigns are real, and they have professional tests that are just as long and debatably just as professional as an actual ATC pilot. Great instructions, just know that if you do decide to join the platform beware that if you are knew you may face a lot of inital criticism as well as extensive training. Also, I love how the team here at Tower Sim 3 are constantly pushing out updates which is super exciting, I hope that in the next major update here they can add even more realistic commands or different difficulties for people who want either easier or a more realistic ATC expereience. I would also love to see you be able to control other parts of ATC such as en-route controlling, approach, departure, and of course ground. And I know that this is a lot to ask for but it would be SO FUNNY if they added the pilots having small chit chat with ATC every now and then, like an actual converation and you would be able to respond. I am not quite sure how that would be able to be executed and I am sure that would take a lot of coding and power but just that small thing would add so much more realism. i would also would really enjoy an entire major updater revolved around making the commands you tell the planes more realistic to real world, as of right now the commands are very simple which may be nice to those who are starting out but gets very boring very easily to those who are much more experienced.

Interesting concept for sure, but executed badly.

Cons:
1. Voice recognition is extremely bugged. Even after doing the recommended steps to improve voice recognition in windows. Some of this is on Windows and the voice recognition just isn't great. However the game gets basic instructions wrong. If I say "Runway 25L via charlie, charlie 1, bravo 1" this gets transcribed into Wordpad as "Runway 25 left via Charlie Charlie one bravo one" 9 out of 10 times, yet somehow the game ends up with something different. It doesn't make sense. And of course just like real life, if you have to tell an aircraft something 10 times before they get it right, it messes up the flow of everything. This is game breaking. [EDIT 2/25/24] I found something that has dramatically improved my experience resulting in accurate recognition somewhere around 90% of the time. Open Windows Speech Recognition, on the icon that appears in your system tray, right click and "Open Speech Dictionary"; click "Add new word". You'll type in the word you want then go through the process of saying it to train Windows. I added the following words: cleared; hold; land; runway; short; taxiway; to. I don't know why this works as Windows itself rarely had a problem transcribing the words, but it does indeed work. I went past my return window and was denied a refund so I am determined to make this game work better. For some reason I will occasionally get aircraft that just won't take commands and I usually end up just deleting them. This doesn't change my overall recommendation for the game. It still is way too expensive for what it is and the level of effort required to get it working right. [/edit]
2. Lack of real liveries. I'm not sure if they needed to pay licensing fees to real liveries or just didn't want to pay for the artwork but for $60 the game should have some real liveries and callsigns built in. Such an immersion killer that I don't want pay another $45 to remedy from a third party. There are plenty of payware livery packs for Microsoft and X-Plane that are much more highly detailed for much less money.
3. Graphics - I've seen playthroughs of Tower 3D Pro and honestly I think it looks better than this. This game looks like something that would have come out in 2015. Its graphics are akin to the Airports add-on for Cities Skylines if you have that.
4. Some significant real-world procedures missing.
4a. You can't give a wind call out for takeoff or landing unless the wind is calm - it just doesn't work.
4b. You can't give clearance to push onto a taxi way, its just abbreviated as 'pushback approved'
4c. You can't give 'facing west' instructions on the pushback.
4d. Takeoff RNAV clearances are missing. For example at LAX "RNAV DOCKR, runway 25R cleared for takeoff". I suppose this is because of speech recognition and some of these fixes have spellings that need creative interpretation. Still, a significant omission.
4e. "Give way" instructions are missing. "Give way to the Airbus crossing right to left on taxiway A"
4f. "Follow" instructions for anything other than "company" traffic are missing. For example "Follow the United 737".
4g. No de-ice procedures.
5. The AI voices. Nothing against the Acapela Group, but I don't think I'd want to be advertised for this if those are real people talking, Synthetic generated voices could very likely be better than this.
6. An option to control tower or ground only would have been appreciated. It gets crazy trying to handle both at the big airports. Dev response is to do a multiplayer session where you can divide the tasks up - okay, but what if I don't want to do multiplayer?
7. Price. You might think I'm being very nit-picky - this game is $60, and to get real liveries it's $45 from a third party. So you're in this for $105 if you just want the game and real traffic. So yes, for that kind of money this game should be much more than it is. This is a $25 game in its default state. It is not a simulator as the dev calls it, because of all the things they omit.

If you have played Tower!3D, there is no improvement from the others in this series. It is EXACTLY the same gameplay, and has the same issues. Nothing has changed at all in this 'sequel':

There are many different commands this sim has built into the speech recognition, but there is no rhyme or reason for half of it. Why in the world are 'Standby' and 'I read you X by X' recognized commands in this game, yet I cannot say 'Verify you have Information X', when they literally added an ATIS as a selling point for this game.

The stock game should allow you to do things that a real tower has to do, such as run a pattern with pistons while balancing airline traffic. There are no FBOs to send GA planes - probably because the GA planes never show up. We were sold on having multiple aircraft types and categories to work with, the runway selection screen has icons describing different 'varieties' (for lack of a correct term) of aircraft that can arrive, but all you get are airliners.

The biggest pain pointfor me: Aircraft come to a complete stop BEFORE THE HOLD SHORT BAR on the active runways, which is ABSURD. To be clear, by default, airplanes in this sim will sit on an active runway - and they don't even call you up. Everybody with even a passing interest in aviation knows that planes clear the runway and then contact ground. Despite this, they make it a point to call for pushback for departure, even though they are in a non-movement area.

I don't know who the developers consulted for their ATC knowledge - but they should get their money back.

Former real-world Air Traffic Control Specialist. Voice recognition and engine needs some additional work. When using correct taxi phraseology, the engine does not recognize the phrase "taxi via", and is unable to interpret the correct instruction given. Additionally, instructions cannot be combined, resulting in the need to make 2 or sometimes 3 transmissions to each aircraft to advise them to hold short of specific taxiways or runways. Gameplay can be fun, but is short lived in challenge. Not worth the $60 in my opinion, especially for those with some aviation or even VATSIM experience

If you want to feel the real deal for controlling at Tower level, this isn't it. It is way too expensive for what it is and definitly not worth the 50€ pricepoint. It would be better if it would only cost 10-20€.

The voices of the pilots are the default free voices for any voice AI and don't sound good. Sometimes it sounds like that the pilots are screaming at you.

The Voice Recognition is also quite bad as I had multiple cases of it not understanding "Pushback approved" or understanding "South" as "North".

The realism is also not given, as you don't need to readback the winds for takeoff, or have to issue IFR Clearances. I am also not sure if I just didn't have it, or if it even is implemented but I have seen no VFR traffic.
Reading back the winds is also a challenge as you need to speak really really slow and pray that it doesn't understand something completely wrong.
You can also not say "Taxi to holdingpoint Runway XX via X". You will have to say "Taxi to runway XX via X" which makes this whole game more unrealistic.

I also doubt that this tool is being used to train real world traffic controllers. As it has so many errors and incosistancies.

You also controll multiple freaquencies, however you can't tell them to switch the frequency from ground to tower for example.

As a real life ATC I can only say that the game is amazing. Of course it's not perfect but at this moment you can't get closer to the real life experience with anything else on the market (not counting maybe VATSIM but that's a totally different thing). Let me summarize the main features of the game, the good sides and possibly what it misses:

- the way you talk to the airplanes is very close to real life, the phraseology might differ just a bit and is a bit too schematic, but that's just the downside of using voice recognition rather than talking to real human
- all the ATC techniques work as they should and reassemble real life very well
- airports are realistic with every little taxiway named correctly
- airlines callsigns and schedules are true to real life (although you have to pay extra for that)
- radar display is realistic although a bit simplified to real life
- flight strips are semi realistic, you can use them to some extent but they can't be really used to identify conflicts and you will have to rely mostly on ground radar display (which you would do anyway as bigger airports use that and are often working stripless)
- there is a variety to chose from between very large airports with enormous traffic and some smaller ones with more chill out experience
- multiplayer support is just an amazing thing, you can divide the traffic between positions as ground and air adding even more to realism and immersion
- lack of VFR flights unfortunately, which is not something important on busy airports but for the smaller ones takes a bit of realism and challenge
- total lack of vehicles, which are an important part of real life aerodrome control
- flexibility of how you setup the experience (for example how you chose which runways to use) allows for very realistic operations or some experimenting, unfortunately there is no complete description on what configurations are realistic for each airport, you will have to figure it out or do some research in the AIP
- graphics is very good and you can move the camera freely, therefore you can either position it where you want or stick to tower view as in real life, although in that view a large monitor (or even multi monitors) is recommended for better experience
- some of the screens are configurable so you can craft the flight strips or radar displays the way you want them, unfortunately there is no editor for that, you will have to edit .csv files
- the manual is very basic, it just tells you how to operate the game, it unfortunately lacks some kind of introduction on ATC techniques, how you should work on paralled dependent runways and so on, you will have to get this knowledge from other sources
- there is a Discord channel with very helpful community
- the price tag is pretty high but it's justified as the product is not aimed at a wide audience

Among many job simulators available this one really does it very well. Comparing it to real life it's really as close as it could possibly be. The game is missing some parts of the real job, like for example handling vehicles, but in general gives the right and proper feel. The learning curve is steep and if you have no experience in real ATC it might be overwhelming at first but it's really worth the effort. Remember that IRL we spend hundreds of hours to learn the job and then years to master an airport, being prepared to handle it in different configurations, weather conditions etc., so this is how much time you can spend on each airport to master it and you have 6 of them for the start with many more to buy additionally. Even though I do this stuff for living I still like to play the game from time to time because it gives me new airports, new challenges, new ways to develop myself in a non stressful environment, just having fun.

If you are interested in ATC and want to get the feeling of how all of this works it's just an amazing product for you to play. However if you are not willing to spend hours learning and mastering it probably you should skip it and decide to pick up something much simpler than that.

The game is difficult, challenging but really satisfying to play.

FeelThere priced this like a high quality, polished simulator. Unfortunately it can’t meet those expectation. It feels very unfinished, more like an early access title.
I really like this game, and enjoy playing it; but for the asked price I just can’t recommend buying it in its current state.

I really need to pay other 50€ to have real airline 💀🤡