Whatever you do, DO NOT buy this game from Steam. Go directly to the developer to purchase. The developer released a hot fix two weeks ago June 7, 2016, and Steam/Dovetail has not updated the product as of June 20, 2016. I still cannot play KLAX because of plane collisions.

I do not recommend this product as long as Dovetail is involved. And the worst part is that Steam will not refund my money.

Update, June 27, 2016 three weeks later and still no hotfix.

Update, June 29, 2016, the developer has released SP1 available to those except Steam users, and still no sign of the hotfix for those who bought through Steam, shame on Dovetail/Steam.

I've put a ton of hours in on Tower! 2011, and I'd suggest to wait on a purchase.

Missing many features of Tower! 2011:

- No voice command.
- Unable to select trafic density.
- Only one setting for time compression. You either play real time, or max acceleration. No 2x, 4x, etc.
- Extended commands (i.e. "VIA" and "AFTER TAKEOFF FLY...") are not part of the UI, have to be typed manually.
- You cannot type two commands in at once (You have to type "TAXI TO..", hit enter, click send, select the aircraft again and then type "AFTER TAKEOFF FLY..", hit enter).
- Graphics issues (landing lighs are spheres of illumination the radius of a 737 cockpit).
- UI issues (limited zoom, fixed camera location, no way to change the size of text on the strip window).
- Planes readback is not in common avionic parlance (250 is read "two fifty" instead of "two five zero").
- Limited setup options (can't turn off bloom, turn on AA, etc).
- No manual or charts.

Feels like a beta more than a finished sim. Hope they will fix the issues.

Tower 3D is an Air Traffic Controller game aimed towards the casual end of the 'simulator' genre of games. It's no ATC2 or Global ATC (and doesn't pretend to be), but it's not a lightweight time management game like Airport Madness either. Tower 3D is aiming for a very neglected middle ground for ATC sims, so I had huge hopes for this one!

However, I'm disappointed at the missed potential here. It didn't need to do anything different (all the basics for an excellent casual game are right there) but it should have done them all so much better! Here's a list of the good and bad stuff so you can decide for yourself:

• It's a fun presentation of ATC (ie not just a radar screen) for people new to the genre
  
• A basic tutorial mode is provided
  
• Aircraft strips have plenty of details about speed, direction, attitude and altitude
  
• There is flexibility to type specific commands as well as click pre-defined instructions
  
• The game offers 3D views of the planes taking off and landing

• The graphics are really bad. I have the game running on the 'Fantastic' setting using an nvidia Titan Black, but here are two example screenshots (recommended that you view full-size) that are far from 'fantastic' with jagged lines and muddied textures.
  
• There are no free-camera options whatsoever - you can only zoom in slightly and have no control over the direction of view, and the camera frequently gets stuck pointing at nothing until the next plane arrives which can take a while
  
• It's missing some basics such as 'holding short' of the runway, expediting aircraft, accounting for wind factor and such
  
• Planes inexplicably stop and wait - and wait more - before carrying out a take-off command
  
• Only the ground controller role is simulated (there's no tower, approach or departure gameplay)
  
• All commands are read by the same voice - there are no 'radio' voice recordings for different pilots (totally immersion breaking)
  
• The GUI leaves a lot to be desired with windows that are difficult to resize or reposition for a better fit, and various buttons in dire need of basic tooltip descriptions
  
• No manual to explain more detailed options
  
• It feels very unfinished - a sentiment echoed in nearly all reviews so far. Maybe it was released to an unforgiveably tight deadline, in which case, hopefully the developers will be able to relax a little and start the polishing this game needs.

Hard to say. If the developers voice intentions to improve it, then there IS a good game lying beneath all the faults. Right now though, and without that commitment, £22 (current price) is just too high for the quality offered. It's not an Early-Access title so (unless FeelThere declare otherwise) there has to be the assumption that no further improvements will happen. As a result, I find it hard to recommend - yet wish I could because this exact game is needed badly on PC. Hopefully, it will be improved and polished, and if that happens, I will adjust this review accordingly.



Casual
Airport Madness! (stupidly fun, casual time-management game)

Intermediate
ATC3* (pitched at the same level as Tower 3D)

Serious
ATC2 (vintage, but still current and the most serious ATC to date)
Global ATC ('new kid on the block' but has a free playable demo you can try)

______________

* ATC3: I Am An Air Traffic Controller (its full title) can only be bought as a full product from Technobrain (in Japanese only). For international gamers, there are fan-made English versions of ATC3 for download from the web. Note that ATC3 is in no way similar to the much more serious title ATC2.

I just bought the game recently, after reading all the reviews posted on Steam, which were not very good. English is not my mother tongue, so my apologies in advance about it.

I'm not very demanding about the graphic quality (in fact, I play in medium configuration level, just imagine) and find them acceptable for the price of the game. I agree that they are not the last generation, but by the type of game and the price, I see them appropriate.

I am not a reviewer, but since SP2 was added, in which they have solved most of the problems users complained about months ago and because nobody has dared to make a positive assessment, I have decided to publish this comment.

The game has some high hardware requirements, but to medium configurations it runs well and I have not found any bugs. The game is user friendly and the learning curve is simple. I have played a lot of ATC games and although this is not the most professional I have tried, it is nice to be able to play without having to write endless cryptic commands. In addition, compared to most, obviously (and despite the low quality some complain), the graphical interface is very nice. It is not a professional game, but casual instead, and funny.

Here, some suggestions about my experience in this kind of games. Most should be easy to implement in a future SP:

- I will love to have a blinking PAUSE signal when I have the game paused.

- A skipping time button when you found your airport with no planes till the next strip together with (not instead) the accelerated time.

- Keyboard shortcuts for the commands. I mean, after you click in a plane or plane strip and get the callsign, would be lovely that the commands were numbered and you can press 1 for “Taxi to”, 2 for “Cleared for”, etc… and later 1, 2 or 3 again for the second row of orders (Runways if you had choose “Taxi to”, for example). The use of the ENTER key as "Send" would also be advisable.

- Random time inside the choices of time selection.

- The manual is not extensive and little help for the new players. Explaining that the "Escape" key is the one used to exit/finish the scenario would also be useful.

- Some tool tips on the plane strip would be lovely and helpful when you leave the mouse over the information strip. What I mean is information on what it means everything in that strip. (Indicative, airplane class, transponder, destination, ...)

- About the above, having a flight plan projected on departing planes, or destinations on the radar, could help to avoid the near miss between the departing aircraft.

- Some way to restart the escenario without going to the main menu.

- Aircraft should warn the tower when they are waiting to cross a runway. I never have got that communication from the pilots and they could be there forever.

- Any warning sound when penalties happens would be charming also.

- And the zoom… Yes! The zoom. It is a great idea to have only the control tower view to do things realistic, but some airports are huge, and it is too dificult to see everything properly. In a take of queue it is very dificult to know which plane is first to give it clearance, and some planes are holding their movement so far away that sometimes you can’t see if they are moving or not. And there is no any way to know their situation by radio contact either.

- Oh! And some way to save the ingame windows forever in any scenario that you play. Having to resize every time that you play is a little bit annoying.

I really miss the wind changes too.

Complete waste of money, the game is "unplayable" in the current state - by which I mean that the game doesn't offer almost any gameplay at all. The AI is rubbish, the visuals are from 10 years ago, the SP1 is released 3 weeks ago, but not on steam. Just avoid here. If you really have to, then get the product from devs directly.
The product offers only 3 odd airports: one on remote island with almost no traffic - pretty miserable, then one from LA which is a huge step up from the first one, and 3rd which is totally uninteresting, and similar size as the second (KLAX).

This game is not to buggy or too unplayable. It works as design, just not fun.
At least for my try, there is no problem, I haven't try to deliberately give wrong instruction to see what happend.
But no pushback clerance, no way to change taxi route, very late landing clearnce are possible.... and only 10pts for TO and LD while the most challenge part is to manage ground taxi..
Just not fun. while not much sim here too.

Ok well. I had high hopes for this one. Put in just under 4 hours before getting frustrated. This product suffers from a serious case of "Unfinished" feel. So many issues with a game that has such enormous potential, but seems to have been rushed to release. I cleared my runway of arrivals and departs only for the camera to be stuck on the last depart until another aircraft checked in. In the mean time, I'm staring at empty sky watching a jet leave my view with absolutely no way to change the camera focus to something else at the airport or terminals. A free camera mode seems to be mandatory, but totally absent from the game. There also seems to be a total lack of a manual available here on steam, or even at the web site link.

While I can command the aircraft to change direction to avoid a mid air collision, there is no click menu option to change the altitude of an aircraft in flight, nor to assign one at take off. Flight strips also seem to be incomplete. While I'm use to the aircraft strips in Global ATC, this seems to make the Tower 3D version to be lacking useful information.

The game can have a lot of down time where you wait for something to happen. It would be nice to be able to change density of the traffic.

Sound effects of engines speed up and shut down are seriously cheesy. Even engine sounds in Airport Madness 3D are better. The computer voice acknowledgments of commands or check ins are also not polished. Traffic commands are not repeated or excepted in industry standard format, so just don't quite make it believable.

Sure seems like an early access game, not a polished simulation. For $29.99 with the future of pay to play DLC, and the additional cost for the PRO version, I can not recommend it. Maybe when/if it becomes polished or at least having the feeling of being complete.

EDIT - 6-15-2016 - Ok, I now have about 21 hours in this game. There are graphic bugs with planes parking in terminals, spinning 360 degrees over and over to finally stop in odd and unparked positions. Planes commanded to line up and wait, will spin 360 degrees in under 1 second as it turns onto the runway. If you fast forward time to get through a boring night, could find a bug where traffic just doesn't happen. I waited almost 12 "control hours" at one point waiting for new traffic to finally end up quitting the game.

I have a better grip on the "undocumented functions" of the game, still no manual available that I can find. The camera button will stop the annoying camera change focus. That's good. Again, I love this kind of game, but still see this one as not complete or rushed. Again, for $29 very over priced.

EDIT – 7-18-2016 – I now have more then 40 hours of game play in. The new patch finally released on the steam version has many of my gripes patched, but this should have been a while ago. Much more playable, but silly little bugs still exist. For example, occasionally when an aircraft turns on to the runway for takeoff, they make a 360 degree spin in under a second. Aircraft sound is still cheesy, I suspect that won't change. I'm not really sure what my expectations are of this game. After all, it is a game. But, if Dovetail follows their typical pattern, you will spend a ton of money on DLC, and see perpetual annoying bugs which will never be resolved.

It still has a lot of rough edges. One thing I would really like to a Free Camera that I can just fly anywhere I\'d like to and watch from any angle.

At this point definitely not happy with it being 29.99, would of been happier with the quality of gameplay to buy it for 19.99.

Please read this all text for an understanding of why I recommended this game despite its current deficiencies. This is based on a very short stint (the tutorial, plus a few minutes outside of the tutorial). So with that qualification:

While the premise is promising and there is definitely potential, the game has a very unfinished feel to it. The very first tutorial aircraft I encountered pushed back from the the St. Thomas terminal like a proper airliner... wow, neat.... except for the fact that it was a Cessna. OK then. Then on the GA ramp that typically would have hosted the Cessna, a Dash 8 type turboprop taxiied right though the farm of its fellow turboprops to get to the taxiway. The game took a slight hit to suspension of disbelief there. And the Cessna thing seemed pretty darned obvious to me.

Rushed. But could be fixed.

Pros: Promising mechanics, aircraft behave more or less as they should when commanded.
Cons: Rudimentary graphics and textures. Aircraft movement is not terribly smooth. View control is poor; zoom functionality is not terribly effective.

This has the potential to be a really good and engaging sim, but it's not there yet.

My advice - buy it to support the developer and encourage them to keep working on it. Try it out. You'll probably be disappointed. But come back in 6 months and I expect (or hope) that it will be signficantly improved from its launch state.

Simpler but worst.

- Cannot ask for aircraft to hold short of runways.
- Graphics are very poor, probably using Google Earth for ground textures
- Ground, taxiways and runways are not aligned, so sometimes aircrafts taxi out of the airport zone (KLAX 25R) or are parked on taxiways...
- Commands are way too simple, basically are ''clear to taxi'' ''clear for takeoff'' and ''clear to land'' only.
- Very not user-friendly
- Lack of settings is incredible
- No text to understand the voice of pilots
- That mentionned voice of pilots is always the same male text-to-speech dude, feels like a robot.
- You will end up with penalties and you will never know what you did wrong, they will just remove points from your score.
- Sound effects are very low and not varied.
- Aircraft textures are very very very low.
- Not what you see on the screenshots and on the video.

Refunded after 45 minutes.