I have been playing Airport CEO on and off for over a year. I have enjoyed having the chance to build an airport, but at the same time it has not always had enough to athrall me and make me want to play it time and time again.
After months of neglecting to really read the updates from Apoapsis Studios, I did take the time to see that Airport CEO has made it into the Beta phase of it’s journey. So it is time for me to revisit this newly Beta indie game and see what has developed.
This is a game available directly through Steam, or via my Humble Bundle Parter link.
What is Airport CEO?
The game is Pretty much what it says on the title. You are the CEO of an airport that you have placed on the world map. From nothing, and depending on your difficulty with a varying amount of cash, you have to build up your airport from a small private airstrip to a multi-terminal profit Machine.
There are many ways that you can manage this. From the features to entertain the passengers to ensuring that aircraft are suitably ready for service, you could have anything go wrong. with some of the more recent updates, you can quite literally have the worst avionic day of your life.
Across this largely sandbox game, you progress through varying sizes of aircraft, with their challenges, various shopping and eating experiences and expand your airport above and beyond ground as you try to keep your airport turning.
Keeping the Customer Satisfied
As the game has progressed there is clearly been a thought process into the customer journey. I remember when passenger route finding was an unoptimized mess, but things are now much better. There is a consistent queuing system in place and passengers make use of logic to determine where they are going.
You need to be strategic though, in pushing your customers past the restaurants, or to the vending machines. You need to make sure that staff are there to serve them at the right time and get the back-of-house tasks done in the interim.
You have to make sure the aircraft are clean, de-iced, and catered, keeping the airlines satisfied and paying you money.
That does not mean that they won’t all implode though, especially when you get to later parts of your build and find that you have inadvertently caused more problems then you have solved.
Danger, Danger…. or Mayday
One of the most recent additions to the game has been the introduction of emergency services and emergency situations.
You can now have anything from fires to medical Issues to disturbances requiring the police. You have to have your wits about you and lay your airport out with just enough space to be able to get round it in a hurry. Not building your response in time will cost you both reputation and money, as the fines mount up and the emergencies keep on coming.
Personally, I think the frequency and introduction of the emergency elements need a bit of tweaking. There is no warning that this begins in Airport CEO, and certainly I have not seen it mentioned in the in-game tutorial yet. You would have to be aware of it in Research and Development to even know it exists in the first instance.
It’s not just about gameplay!
The graphics overhaul is welcomed. New icons for building elements, although for the management menus on the right hand side it is still far to easy forget as they are so faint. There are some missing menu items in my opinion though. One for example, leads to contractor deployment and Research and Development, and it does not appear in the easy access menu at all.
I do also find that there is a problem with the graphics sometimes, when things get complicated and all of a sudden the game interface throws a paddy.
For example, here I was installing my first baggage handling facility on an airport. To be fair, I started off by having just one segment of the baggage belt in the wrong orientation. Once that was resolved though and things were working, it continued to insist that there was something wrong.
A quick reload solves the problem, but surely the game can realise that the baggage service is working enough to remove the errant icon.
… and this is where my complaints begin…
There are still a few elements, some that I have moaned about in bug reports already, that do not seem to have been attended to:
Double Charging
If I build a public road for example, and then build a second road to make a crossroads, the middle block is still charged for a second time. I would presume there is no check in there for “Is this square already occupied?” in the same way as object collisions. It’s a little gripe, but still one that could cost a fortune under the wrong circumstances.
The Flight Planner
I know that not everyone will want to micromanage this, and will immediately head towards the games auto planner [hint: you need two specific board members to achieve this – can you afford $100+ an hour?].
The planner needs some refinement though. When you have certain emergencies for example, all of the flights will stack up ready for when the emergency is over. It is extremely difficult to move those flights to other stands or other timed slots. You will probably find one of the flights is either already on stand, or actively on it’s way to your Airport, which then prevents you moving any flights under it.
One other gripe about the flight planner is when you have flights within 3 hours of arrival, they are locked and you can not change them. It would be nice to simply change their stand, rather than have to cancel the flight altogether. You never know when the next plane is going to fail on the stand!
But there ARE Good Things
I actually think that Airport CEO is a great game to play. The game is obviously not entirely realistic but it does not really matter. The fact that fire trucks will drive through a planes wing to reach an emergency is not as much of a complaint when you then see it putting out a fire on the runway.
I think the development and implementation of things like shops and restaurants, the micro-management of staffing levels, contracts and passenger journeys is brilliant.
The whole idea that you begin with a completely blank canvas and build your airport up based on your starting cash is a really sound idea. Playing on the most difficult starting cash of £500,000 has me waiting years to implement my first medium aircraft stand – and there are still large aircraft to come!
… and there are things I hope are in the Bug Squash Queue
There are quite a few niggling bugs though. These are things that do not necessarily cause any destructive game-breaking things to worry about, but do also need to be taken account of and dealt with.
I am talking again, unfortunately, about issues with flights and allocations.
All Day – GA (and all night too)
In terms of commercial flights, you will not be able to deal with night-time flying straight away. It is a matter of fact, unless you want to max-min the research. In terms of the Air Traffic Control towers, you have a limited number of flights that are controllable at each level.
General Aviation is a whole different story though. From day 1, you appear to be able to run General Aviation flights in and out of your airfield on an unlimited basis and 24 hours a day.
Now, back in the Alpha build days, GA flights were not able to fly overnight and had to sit on stand for 8 or 9 hours before taking off around 5am. Maybe it is that rules about landing and taking off General Aviation flights are different, but when you have them taking off at times when Commercial flights are grounded, seems odd.
… and back to the Flight Planner
One other thing, which is actually more of a cheat than a bug. The flight planner is not actually adept enough to combine some of the major “disasters” that ground flights, with the planning of new ones.
In one example, while existing flights are grounded, and we complained about it above and the scheduling prevention it causes; opening up a new stand and setting it up for auto planner will cause new flights to be added and land in and out of the flight grounding!
I know – lots of moans about Airport CEO
This is genuinely a good game though. I enjoy the challenge of not going broke, I enjoy watching thousands of passenger sprites running around terminals on the fastest game speed and going about their business.
The game has it’s annoying bits, but the Apoapsis Studios developers have taken the time to make sure there is little to actually break the game. The game is still technically Beta, so we would expect things like this to occur, and I hope that they continue to develop the game to a full release.
I have a long list of things that I still need to test as well. I have not got to needing multiple terminals yet in these new builds. I have not been able to implement large stands and aircraft yet.
If you think this review is something that has made you want to buy Airport CEO, from Apoapsis Studios, please consider buying the game through my Humble Bundle Partner link and support my continued ranting here and on Twitch.
You can see more on the Airport CEO website as well.
You can follow them on Twitter @AirportCEO