SimAirport – Review

Everyone loves going on holiday, you just turn up at the airport, hand in your luggage and tickets, then take your boarding pass to the gate and hop on the plane, simple right?
Well SimAirport proves running a successful airport is anything but simple and before you know it you’ll have a complex system to keep your customers firmly in the belief that things are far more straight forward than they actually are.

Jumping in to the game, you have the choice between continuing with a basic airport that has the essentials and $450,000 to expand, or starting from scratch with extra cash, but nothing more than a large piece of land to build on.
It’s worthwhile working through some of the tutorials, while these can go on a little, they do a great job of explaining everything.

The basics of an airport start with customers arriving, they then need a ticket desk and then a route through a security zone to a secure area, where they will find a waiting lounge near their desired gate and might even have a first-class lounge, before finally boarding their plane ready for some in-flight peanuts.
If they’re lucky, while staff will collect their luggage and take it to the planes for them.
You’ll need to organise planes into time slots, which are colour coded for early AM, AM, PM or late PM.
To start taking flights outside of daytime hours, you’ll need to upgrade your runway to add lights and you’ll also need an air traffic control tower soon enough.
And to keep your travellers happy, they’re going to want some seats while they’re waiting to depart.
All of these upgrades need paying for, so there’s various ways to make more money, bringing in more flights is one method, but while a customer is waiting to fly, you can distract them with cafe’s stores, and arcades all of which can be set-up however you want.

The management aspect doesn’t stop at the flights either, you’ll need to make sure you’ve got enough storage for the stores, as well as making certain they offer enough products to keep the shoppers happy. And as your airport expands, you’ll also need to ensure there’s adequate parking, as well as enough areas both before and after check-in to keep everyone occupied.

After spending a few hours with the starter airport, I decided to experiment, starting from scratch I accessed the simple sandbox controls to give infinite cash and unlock all research and development, so I could build the airport of my dreams.

On the ground floor, I had a large lobby, with an open-plan cafe, with a kitchen behind it, then a large store and arcade just beyond that. With toilets at the end of the lobby, the other side had a check-in area with 6 desks, each one designated to a specific gate. Customers then moved through the security area to have their id and bag’s checked and progress through a 3D scanner, before moving onto the large corridor complete with moving floors and some more toilets, into one of 6 lounges leading the relevant gate.

Each lounge also had a first-class area, a coffee or bar for passengers to grab a drink before they fly, and the larger gates, had escalators leading up to the first floor for passengers to board their flights.

Underground, surrounding a large car-park, I had a complex baggage system. Once customers had checked-in, their suitcases were sent via conveyor belts, through a sorting hub and onto the depot for the corresponding gate, the idea was for staff to collect that to load on the plane, and when flights came in, baggage would be routed through a second network of conveyors, to the large baggage collection area on their way to the exit.

This is where we get good and bad news, the good news is, whenever you put something in place, it’s highlighted red with warning icons if something isn’t right, and my fancy baggage network required a hangar, with a baggage truck, as the final piece of the puzzle.
Unfortunately, while everything else was pretty simple to get working thanks to a box in the bottom right that tells you exactly what you need, I couldn’t add a baggage truck to the hangar, meaning the 7 hours I’d spent masterminding a massive airport, was left with basic manual handling of baggage requiring more staff.

Obviously, this review is from a pre-release version of the game, and we’ve already spoken with the developers who have reassured us that they’re looking into it, so a fix is expected soon.
But even without the fancy automated luggage system, my airport was still able to operate pretty well. (Being honest, it was the slow security workers that seemed to hold up all my passengers, not the staff getting bags to and from the aircraft, but security was improved by adding an upstairs section for security doubling scanners and providing customers in the larger gates a route to the top floor of their waiting lounge.

Because of this we haven’t adjusted the review score negatively, for an issue we’re confident will be fixed long before most people would be at a point where they experience it, but if this sounds like a major issue, it might be worth holding off a week post release to give the developers time to fix.

Throughout the game you’ll have a lot of menus to navigate, and this is one area that SimAirport struggles with take-off, the core management is kept pretty simple, and the user interface is mostly easy to understand. However, when you want a specific item, it’s a little convoluted to find it, firstly down on the d-pad selects the bottom bad, then you highlight and choose the build menu, enter into “objects” and then have to search through to find your desired item. While these can be broken up into genres such as retail, cafe, etc, I found a few occasions where Item’s weren’t where I expected them to be, and I had to keep searching trying to remember the exact name and either scrolling through a long list, or using the search function, which is never a simple process with an on-screen keyboard.

The other downside is how some selections work, if you decide to expand a room, and delete the central wall, you’ll then need to manually re-add any designated area (such as security, ticketing, cafe, arcade) as well as find the exact carpet you used to fill in the empty patch.
Likewise, having to manually lay foundations whenever you’re building in a new area is fair enough, but when it’s under or above existing buildings, it should at least have the option of allowing such a necessary process to be done automatically.
It does overcomplicate things a little, but when you get used to things, you can quickly perform whatever actions you’re targeting.

On to overall presentation and the graphics remind me of games like Prison Architect, top-down, quite flat, but you have a wide range of zoom, from being able to see the entire airport on screen at once, and then close enough to see the smile on the faces of all those happy passengers.

The overall user interfaces manages pretty well considering the amount of data, and while I did experience a little slowdown when I had a massive airport with 4 runways, a packed flight schedule and thousands of passengers scurrying around the airport like ants, it was negligible and really didn’t effect the overall gameplay.

Sound is pretty limited, with no background music, it’s all quite barren, and apart from the usual ticks and clicks when selecting items, it was a very quiet (and peaceful) time setting up my Airport while on pause.
When opened up and dozens… Okay, hundreds and soon thousands of passengers were rushing through the front door like the first Black Friday sale in a decade. But still the sound remained relatively calm and discreet except for the roar of a few airplanes taking off.
It’s certainly a game you might want to play while asking Alexa to play some airport lounge music.

l over a dozen hours, SimAirport is a captivating game, where even with my super-airport waiting for the baggage fix, I was still finding things to improve after ten hours, adding a train station for passengers to arrive and depart easier, and tweaking how often buses and trains arrived helped to avoid long waiting times, and the inclusion of offices and conference rooms and flight crew lounges helped improve relations with airlines, which opened up more flights which allowed me to start offering those early AM flights.
One issue I did encounter with this prolonged time in one large airport was the occasional UI glitch which stopped me making certain selections, Saving and reloading the game worked perfectly fine, but it’s another issue that the developers hopefully address sooner rather than later.

Overall SimAirport is a fun, engrossing game, which takes some getting used to, but will provide many hours of enjoyment as you pursue the never-ending quest of creating a large airport that flows like clockwork. There are a couple of bugs which will need to be ironed out as soon as possible, but overall I thoroughly enjoyed my time with SimAirport.

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