Puffin Planes

A solid and very fun "Management Tycoon" game, that does still fall into the traps of the genre. The presentation of the game is incredibly charming and very easy to read. The bird mascots are a fun edition to what can often be a sterile genre. The mechanics can be seen without needing to read a guide, with one exception. The Travel demand or where people want to go, appears inside airport menus rather then being more easily accessed. This can lead to a few false starts and early fail states until you locate this information. Once the game gets going it will progress exactly as you would expect and you will massively compound and out pace your competition (at least one classic). The game does struggle with the same problem most all tycoon games suffer from which is a constant challenge or ramping up. Once you reach escape velocity you may as well be playing a sandbox game without any restrictions. The multiplayer most certainly would address this, however I believe that the AI should be more of a factor in a game. Leaving the everything at the default settings I did not encounter a rival airline in any meaningful way till 50 quarters in, by then I could immediately buy whole airports and companies but never saw a reason to. Expansion would also slow down dramatically as plane manufactures could not keep up with my demand alone. The first 4 to 6 hours of this game are very enjoyable and worthwhile, however after that it quickly falls to diminishing returns.