An excellent effort for a portable flight sim.

User Rating: 7.3 | Pilot ni Narou! Flying All-Stars PSP
Flight academy is hard to describe. It feels as though it has so much potential, yet its flaws will sometimes bring it down in a fit of frustration. As one of the only flight simulators available for the PSP, or probably any portable console actually, it holds its ground quite well. Graphically, it looks great and performs well. Sound is alright, nothing to write home about. The music tends to be a tad out of plate at times and I found myself lowering the volume on it quite a bit. The air engine sounds are little off but do well enough.

The frustration, as everyone who's played this game will probably agree, come with mainly the controls, and lack of an intuitive tutorial. Also, some missions can be down right unforgiving and almost impossible to complete. Don't get me wrong, I like high difficulty in my video games, but some of these missions just overdo it, and I can't really understand why.

Getting back to the controls... Let me tell you this right now so you don't have to figure it out.. Hold SELECT for your landing gear, and hold L+Down to switch targets. The rest of the buttons can be discovered by experimenting, but those two are undocumented and absolutely necessary. Although the game has some tutorials, they just tell you what to do and never mention which PSP buttons control those actions, which is rather odd. The analog stick which serves as your flight control can be extremely sensitive depending on what kind of plane you're flying. I found that most of times, going in 1st person view really helped how well I could control the plane, so be sure to give it a try.

Overall, it's an ambitious work, but one that shows us that flight sims can be done and done well on the PSP. Had this game seen a little more polish and refinement, I'm sure it would have been a hit. Very much worth playing for people who love flying and willing to spend a few hours mastering the controls.