Game Name
Airport City from Game Insight
Description
Another week, another great city builder game from Game Insight, this time called Airport City. The twist with this game is that you’ll spend your time and your virtual money building an airport and the community that supports it.This is another very detailed, very intricate game that introduces you to the virtual world of airport management. You’ll start your first day with a plot of land and an airport terminal and build out your fly-in community from there.Your success is determined by your ability to build out your city and attract passengers, build out your airport to handle larger and larger planes, all while collecting enough money to handle your next big upgrade.
How it works
When you start the game, you’re presented with your first tutorial, which should be familiar to you if you’ve played any of the other Game Insight city builder games. Your first task is to build a runway, a hangar and buy your first plane to take your first test fight.
While your plane is in the air taking it’s first flight, you’ll start the task of building your city to attract passengers for your airport. You’ll add cottages to your housing stock to give your passengers a place to stay while they wait for their flight to take off. You’ll build restaurants for them to eat in and grocery stores for them to shop in. In level four you’ll add more food and retail options by building a car lot and a bakery. All things that you’ll need to keep your passengers happy and coming back for another flight.
As you collect passengers and fuel, you’ll fly them to the next town over and to international destinations like Egypt and Cypress, all with the intent that you’ll advance your airport to the point where you are flying jumbo jets full of passengers all around the world.
Opinion
I’ve really taken a liking to these niche city builders from Game Insight, and Airport City is no exception. I’ve spent quite a bit of time playing this game over the last 4 days and it’s grown on me very quickly.
The idea behind this game isn’t as simple as My Railway, but it’s still a very easy game to grasp. I learned very quickly not to stress about the size of some of the tasks, and when I decided to let the game play out mostly in real-time, my enjoyment of the game improved dramatically.
This is a very fun, very challenging game to play. I’ve not made many in-app game purchases for additional virtual currency, but I’ve done it in this game. Though the play can be slow at times if you let things play out without speeding up the activities, it’s been a hard game for me to put down.
Tips
- Coins are easy enough to earn, but dollars aren’t. Spend your money very wisely.
- It’s really important that your food and retail options keep pace with your airport as the game progresses. These features are your primary source of income and you’ll need that money later in the game.
- As you build up your businesses in the city, keep in mind that even though they are your primary source of income, that payback is slow. Resist the urge to speed up construction on every single project.
- Resist the urge to speed up flights needlessly. You will have more fuel in your warehouse, but in the later levels international flights can take 24 barrels of fuel to speed up.
- Wait on some of the suggested upgrades until you absolutely need to do them. At 600 gold coins you probably don’t need to jump right on that prompted terminal upgrade to 45 passengers just so you can fly more international flights. Let things like that wait until you have a need to do them and more money to make the upgrade happen.
Ratings
- Speed (4/5) – Some of the tasks are very involved and can take a long time to complete.
- Features (3/5) – The prompts to post every achievement to Twitter and Facebook can be annoying. As your achievements slow down, so do the prompts.
- Theme (4/5) – A lot of thought and detail went into this game.
- Overall (4/5) – I’ve really enjoyed another niche city builder from Game Insight.
Pros
- Detailed and highly focused city builder.
- Much less attention paid to your city and passengers, allowing you to concentrate on building and running your airport.
- Residential portion of your city is nearly self-sufficient. Build it, collect passengers, collect money from your stores.
- Your warehouse builds up a lot of really useful stuff.
Cons
- Tutorials require a lot of building and even some expansion. The money adds up quickly.
- You’ll spend a lot of your opening bank in the first 3 or 4 levels of the game. Manage your money wisely and take every money-making opportunity that you can.
- Some of the upgrades are reasonable, but others are very expensive.
- Some upgrades that are needed are delayed too late into the game. The tower upgrade would be useful much earlier in the game than it is, but you have to choose to wait it out or pay a hefty fee to unlock it.
- Social network sharing prompts are a little over the top.
Conclusion
I really had become worn out on SIM/city builder games because it seemed like the beyond some upgrades in graphics, the plot was always the same. The fact that these Game Insight titles are so different is what keeps me playing all that I have reviewed.I’ve grown accustomed to the niche angle that Game Insight adds to their city builder games, but that doesn’t mean that they are boring at all. Each one of their games provides a unique twist that makes each game interesting om it’s own, and I love what Airport City has to offer.This is another game that worked very well on my 7″ Iconia A100 Honeycomb tablet. Airport City isn’t made for tablets, but it scales up to the bigger screen beautifully and plays very well on it.
Airport City is a keeper for me and I recommend that you try it for yourself. The game is free to download and play and you’ll get quite a lot of use out of your opening bankroll.
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