SimAirport

To summarize the game, it’s a resource/time management game, where the player has to build a working airport. This game has many good aspects and great potential. Most importantly, I found myself enjoying the game. There is a nice balance in the game between trying to make more money, and having to manage bottlenecks such as check-in, security, and boarding the plane. Likewise I found the scheduling system for the planes simple and flexible. I found myself entranced a couple times, like the good old days of playing Civilization, where there’s just one more thing I need to do before I could call it a night. And when I finally looked at the time, it’s 2am. Very few games in recent history have held my attention so well. Some of those games include Ark, No Man’s Sky, Factorio, and Oxygen Not Included. Now to be fair to those games, the quality of those games are far better than this one. Issues to consider: This game reminds me a lot of Windows 95. It is riddled with bugs/issues and the solution for almost all of them? Save your work, restart the computer, and everything will work again. Every early access game I’ve played has had fewer bugs in it than this released game. Normally I’ll just stop playing a game with so many bugs, but when I find a game with potential I’ll take the time to file bug reports. I filed a dozen or so bug reports, none of which were addressed by the developers. Some of the more serious bugs: - The space bar should pause the game, but doesn’t always. Likewise if the game is paused, the spacebar doesn’t always unpause the game. - When the game autosaves, it unpauses the game! - Many graphical issues, including people walking under a moving walkway, or people being drawn with no face. - The game can get stuck in Sheduling staff mode and need a restart. - The clone tool if flaky. The hotkey doesn’t work, and it won’t clone everything. - The baggage system is flaky, and making connections between the baggage sorters is confusing and needs work. - Pressing escape usually closes the open “window”, but not always (ex. “PA Amplifier HD”) - When extending the runway, you need to add tarmac to both ends of the runway, but once added the error remains and you have to restart. - There are many lesser issues such as trucks passing through each other but not “crashing”. Planes that move in unnatural ways (like turning on a dime). Fences on the left and right of the airport provide a “secure” zone, but no need for fences on the top or bottom of the airport. There are also parts of the game that you should be aware of when determining if this is a game for you: - Even though the game has road ramps, underground roads are supported but raised roads are not. - There is no gate to allow vehicles to pass through the security fences. - The research tree is incredibly short and basic. My personal favourite was researching creating one way taxiways – it’s amazing what researching a little paint can do! - The First Class Lounges are unrealistic. There is no receptionist, multiple rooms, free food and drink, VIP staff, etc. Although the game has items like coffee machines and drink machines, they can’t be used in the first class lounges. - The variety of objects in the game needs to be balanced. Most objects in the game, like the retail objects have a very limited variety (two displays for clothes, two for candy, two for jewelry, etc). On the other end, there are 42 different types of floors you can choose from. - The food industry also seems to be fairly unbalanced. One kitchen with 5 chiefs handles the needs of my entire airport (2 small gates, 8 large gates, 1 XL gate – 10,000+ guests a day). - There are key “airport” concepts missing, such as being able to create restaurants (even though you can create a kitchen), monorails, policing patrols, car garages, bridges between buildings (maybe over a road), international flights, customs/immigration, medical facilities, etc. - Cost of things needs rebalancing to be more realistic. A concrete runway (best quality) of 240 length costs $345,000. A foundation the same length and width is $1,274,400. From a realistic point of view, wouldn’t a runway need a foundation? To build a conveyer belt for baggage the same length costs $26,400. To build a moving walkway the same length costs $1,296,000. If you can move bags for $26,400, why does it cost $1,296,000 to move people the same length? - The tools used to work with items under construction don’t always work as expected. - There are two tools to delete things - “Delete” and “Disassemble”. From playing, disassembling something allows you to reinstall it elsewhere. Delete destroy it. But from what I could tell, items could only be affected by one of the two tools, so it’s unclear why two are needed. Neither tools worked on items under construction. The good news is I didn’t find any show-stopper bugs/issues, but the bugs/issues described above are the kind you should only find in an early access game, where the concept is there and playable, but the game has not been polished enough to release. So would I recommend this game? For me, I definitely enjoyed playing this game for about 20 hours and I did play late into the night a couple times. But it’s come to the point where the bugs/issues are outweighing the fun. I’m going to put the game to the side, and take another look after a few updates have come out. I would recommend this game if you think you can handle the many issues within this game. Note I have not listed all the issues in this review. Having a developer’s background would assist in understanding the issues, and being able to find work arounds to keep playing. I’m going to mark this as Not Recommended at this time as I believe the game should still be in Early Access, and there are a lot of issues that should be fixed before I can recommend it as a released game.