Fasten your seatbelts and put your tray table in the seat in front of you and all those other clichéd airline sayings. Get ready to take off with Panic Flight, a simple and free-to-play iPad game that doesn’t feel like extra baggage. It’s a surprisingly fun arcade style touch screen game that you’ll want to take on a test flight.

In the game, you must guide a little plane with your finger around scrolling skies as you travel from one destination to the next. As you soar, collect coins and power-ups to help you reach your goal faster. Avoid clouds that can slow you down and use up fuel, but clever players can ‘surf’ on the edge of clouds to get a speed boost. Avoid virus ‘skulls’ that can hinder your progress, and perform tricks like loops to make your passengers happy and earn bonuses. Just make sure you reach the end of the stage before you run out of fuel, or it’s Game Over.

As you play and complete stages, you’ll earn coins. Use these coins to buy more stages and different airplanes that have varying handling capabilities and powers. You can also upgrade stats on each plane with collected coins, too. There are also side missions that you can complete that will give you bonuses, too. You’ll also unlock training stages as you play that do a good job explaining the ropes (and they are taught by a cute cartoon flight attendant, no less).

Panic Flight is a free-to-play game, but it doesn’t have the problems that most other games of this ilk have. While you can use real money to buy things quicker, you still feel like you’ve accomplished something with each flight. It’s just simple fun, and I really like it, anyway.

Kid Factor:

Panic Flight isn’t rated by the ESRB, but it’s OK for any age. Even if you lose, the plane doesn’t crash. The cute flight attendant just says to get out your parachute! Reading skill is helpful for the menus, but gameplay is easy enough for anyone to understand.

Tags: Game Reviews