I tend to enjoy these style of games, but this one falls short in several areas. I recognize it is a rather cheap game, but that does not excuse some of these in my opinion.
I will need to be rather specific, so technically "spoilers ahead", as much as you can "spoil" a game like this.
First, as others have said, if you return items to a passenger in the wrong order, you can get dinged (even before you unlock the ability to steal). There is no tutorial telling you this, and many people the first time they learn about say, the xray mechanic, will go to return all the items to a person, only to do it in the wrong order (giving them boarding pass and passport first, easy to do because they're right under the portrait) and then you get dinged / steal the third item you were literally trying to give them. This is clunky at best, especially when a dedicated theft system exists in the game that you will unlock. You should just have a button to return the persons items that are left on your desk, this would be huge QoL AND avoid this problem.
Next, lets talk about the incredibly inconsistent newspaper mechanic. You will be presented with a newspaper which serves as the games special requests / quest board. In its tutorial it'll show you something like deny all passengers trying to travel to London. Simple enough, theres a review option for "Newspaper Rule Violation" that you would assume refers to newspaper quests. Multiple times I was burned based on that assumption. The first case is when the newspaper says to deny medical related travel. For context, in another tutorial for high risk travelers, the game shows you how to review travel reasons, itll show you something like the person claiming to travel for medical reasons, but the provided medical paperwork says their procedure was scheduled for several days ago, which for the game is an "invalid travel reason". However, when I get the newspaper for blocking medical related travel, I'll get a passenger (not high risk) who says they are traveling for medical purposes, their ticket and everything is otherwise totally fine, the only reason to deny them is the newspaper. You would think "that is clearly a newspaper rule violation", well, you would be wrong, the game wants you to select "invalid travel reason", which makes literally no sense based on the tutorial / mechanics. Another example is the newspaper said to turn people under the age of 30 away. I had a passenger who was 15, their passport said they were 15, they said they were 15, they were clearly young. So I select "Newspaper rule violation". Nope, game wanted me to select "Age Mismatch". There was no age mismatch, the newspaper said to deny them, they never lied about their age.
Finally, we have to talk about the shady man mechanic. Theft is kindof required in this game, and this mechanic is at least somewhat interesting. However, he ONLY works for items you directly steal from people. You can find all kinds of items you know are worth money to the shady man, like literal gold bars, etc, just sitting around the airport. But you CANNOT sell them to him, those are only valid as lost and found items. Clearly a half baked at best mechanic that is very frustrating all the times it doesn't work.
One more thing, the dialog in the game gives me AI generated vibes at times, its a cheap game, whatever, could just be poor translation, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that AI had a hand in the creation of this game. To be clear, while I would not recommend the game if I learned it used generative AI, that is not why I am not recommending it today, it is simply not a good game today, with or without genai. The developer has public statements that genai is not used with the game, so I'm inclined to believe them, but there were multiple times I got the AI vibe with the text / tutorial prompting. Again, as far as issues go, this is largely just a nitpick, the other issues are hard to overlook when theyre so core to the gameplay loop.
