AirportSim - Review
If you are an aviation geek like me then all it takes is the smell of aviation fuel to get your blood pumping, not to mention the sounds of giant turbo fan engines spooling up. The hustle and bustle and behind the scenes working of airports have always been fascinating to me, the air is always bristling with the excitement of people flying off to far away exciting places and people arriving back home to their eagerly waiting families. There are a lot of options for gamers who like to fly jets whether they be of the combat or passenger variety and there are also a spattering of games that cover airport operations, however none of comprehensively as what AirportSim aims to do. I have been eagerly awaiting the release of AirportSim since the demo first arrived months ago and now I have finally got my hands on the full game, will it take to the skies or be grounded due to mechanical failures? Read on to take a trip to the airport.
Airport operations are a massive undertaking, so much so that a layperson probably has no idea of what it takes to actually getting an aircraft from the passenger gate into the air and the sheer amount of behind the scenes work it requires. I understand the frustration of delayed departures but if you watch any of the numerous airport documentaries available on YouTube then you will probably end up with much more of an understanding of why these delays happen, an airport is made up of many small cogs that all have to work precisely in unison to make sure everything runs to perfection and unfortunately sometimes it only takes one of these cogs to be a bit behind all of the others to cause major delays. MS Games and MK Studios, developers of AirportSim have a full understanding of airport operations and have tried to bring many of the ground tasks performed at most major airports and throw them together into a game.
The sheer amount of tasks to do in AirportSim is quite impressive and include such things as connecting GPU to aircraft, marshalling arrivals into their appropriate gates, connecting stairs and gates to arrivals and refuelling aircraft and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many tasks to undertake in the game with each of them having various degrees of complexity that I highly recommend that as soon as you boot the game up that you first head to the excellent tutorial section, running through all of these took me a couple of hours but it is well worth it as without completing them you will find yourself lost as to what to do once you start playing through the games scenarios, they are fun as well so that helps.
The main gameplay in AirportSim revolves around its scenario, free play and challenge modes and the four included airports Vagar, Keflavik, Warsaw and Key West. Scenarios are a bunch of prebuilt tasks that see you tending to arriving and departing aircraft and all that entails such as securing the areas around the planes, refuelling them, unloading and loading passengers and catering and then pushing back aircraft for departure the scoring in this mode will be based on how many successful tasks you can complete. Free play is just as it says on the tin, you can load into an airport and decide which tasks you want to perform, you can even just sit back and watch aircraft arrive and depart if you wish. Challenge mode is the most demanding mode of the game and is a set of scenarios that are time critical with you losing points if tasks aren’t performed on time.
AirportSim can get hectic as many tasks are time critical, thankfully you have your handy tablet that acts as a central hub for all the tasks in the game, from your tablet you can see arriving and departing aircraft and a handy checklist of tasks you need to perform and the order you need to do them in, the tablet also includes a handy map that shows your position, all of the gates at the airport and it also makes it handy to locate all of the machinery you will need to use to complete your tasks such as tugs, busses, passenger stair vehicles and luggage carts, you can also adjust time and weather from your tablet in some of the game modes. Just be aware that currently some of these tasks can be real finicky and frustrating to complete due to bugs that are currently in the game, I spent hours trying to do the tutorial to connect the jetway to the plane and could not get it to connect, even after talking to the developers and watching the YouTube tutorials they had created I still wasn’t successful in this task and I wasn’t the only one complaining if the Steam forums are anything to go by. Thankfully after the latest patch this issue seems to be fixed.
The developers have done outstanding job in recreating all of the airports and aircraft in the game with all of them being a great recreation of their real life counterparts, both the sights and sounds at the airports serve to fully immerse you in what it would be like to work in an airport environment, you can almost smell the aviation fuel through your monitor. Unfortunately the same can’t be said of many of the tasks you perform in game as many of them can become frustrating due to bugs and since you cannot progress further in a scenario until you can complete certain tasks ultimately some of these bugs become game breaking. This is made all the worse by the fact that the game has no save capabilities and no plans to add one according to the developers, this decision is astonishing given the fact that many of the scenarios in the game can take more than an hour or two so without save game capability you have to have the time to perform whatever scenario you choose in one sitting and if one of the many game breaking bugs rears its ugly head well then you have to start over from scratch, ouch.
I didn’t have the ability to test multi-player in the game as none of my friends own the game but from what I have seen on Twitch and YouTube multi-player seems to work fairly well and I could imagine it would be great fun to designate tasks between each other and go off and perform them. There is also no progression system in the game which I think is a massive oversight that is going to massively hurt the replayability of the game, after a while it feels like you are performing all of this busy work but there are no rewards to motivate you to continue doing so. It would have been a great idea to have rewards of aircraft liveries that you could unlock in the game by completing certain scenarios or even upgraded vehicles you could unlock by completing challenges. The game does have steam workshop integration though, which is a massive win, and there are already quite a few people creating aircraft liveries (even one for my beloved Ansett Airlines) and scenarios to play through in the game, the game includes its own easy to use scenario editor and the developers have also created a handy guide for those wanting to create their own aircraft liveries which is a nice touch.
Ultimately I enjoyed my time playing AirportSim, unfortunately though, a lot of that time was spent being frustrated by finicky controls and bugs that stopped me progressing in the game, I can’t help but think the game should have had an early access period before release in order to iron out some of the many bugs that plague the game as at the price the game was released at there is no excuse for the lack of polish on display here. To the developers credit they are on the ball and active on their discord and in the steam community forums and do seem to be listening to players and fixing bugs as they are discovered.
Your enjoyment of the game is going to largely depend on how much you like sim style games with lots of busy work and how much of a fan of aviation you are, if both of those things tick boxes and you are patient enough to try and play through the bugs until they are fixed then you are most likely going to enjoy yourself here, if you have no interest in aviation or play testing buggy software then you should probably steer clear. The developers have a road map and are planning to add more airports to the game so there are future updates to look forward to but at this stage and at this price point it would be hard to recommend AirportSim as a must purchase even if you are a fan of the genre.
The Score
6.0
Review code provided by Iceberg Interactive
The Pros
Airports and aircraft recreations are well designed and while they don’t reach the detail level of MS Flight Sim there is nothing to complain about here.
Tasks are many and varied and it will take you a long time to master the time management skills required to be a successful ground crew worker
The included scenario editor is a nice touch
The included tutorials are essential in learning to play the game and are well designed
The Cons
The amount of bugs are very disappointing especially for the price point of the game
No save and no progression system are huge oversights and severely hurt replayability
Game can get very repetitive
