LVGameDev LLC has brought the dream of owning your own airport to reality with their latest title, SimAirport. This title throws you into the shoes of an owner of an airport, and you need to expand the operations in order to keep the doors open and the customers coming flowing through the doors. You need to make sure you keep everyone inside the airport happy, both the travelers and the workers. This title was first released on the PC back on the sixth of march 2017 and has now been brought over to consoles.

This title has been developed for you to build and manage your dream airport and this is not as simple as it sounds. The mechanics involved in this game really surprised me with how well they were optimized and used. The first thing I did when opening the airport was put myself into crippling debt, taking every loan I could get my hands on and thinking I could pay this back quickly and easily by owning an Airport.

That ended badly with the airport going nowhere near the size of LAX, and I ended up having to close due to a lack of funding. I went back with an open mind and started off small with an airport that only had a terminal and a runway, just so we could get some flights off the ground and build something successful.

One aspect of this game is that you need to think about your actions, as every action had a reaction, and sometimes it was good and other times it was bad. My little airport is nowhere near the size of LAX, but we will get there one day and I’ll be a multi-billionaire.

The tutorial was my best friend in this title, and it’s really helpful when learning the ropes with the controls and the mapping of the buttons. Unfortunately, I was still a little lost in the grand scheme of things. I’m used to playing this style of game on the PC, and it seemed so much easier using a mouse and keyboard, but once you spend some time doing it with the controller, it becomes second nature. You rely heavily on the analog sticks. There are plenty of options in the game, and like most titles, you can remap the buttons if you are more comfortable playing a certain way.

The sounds needed some work when first looking into the game. You would expect some light elevator music to be playing whilst you are building your airport to be the most successful thing since LAX, but there wasn’t any. I ended up sticking on some Spotify whilst building.

To be honest, there wasn’t much sound-wise in the game at all. You’ll hear the occasional in-game sound from things like the jackhammers going off whilst you were building the foundations, or the occasional beeping sound whilst clicking on something, but it was scarily silent.

This game ran super smooth on the Xbox thanks to the simplicity of the graphics. It’s a top-down game with simple graphics, but the textures could have been made to look a little nicer. The grass, for example, was just green. I would have loved to see some more work done with the graphics in this title. It had the potential to look amazing, but it really lacked in that department, even if the character models were 2D and just looked basic. Current generation consoles have been designed to run high-end graphics and this could have been made so much better.

If you love games where you can make or break a business and are interested in building your dream airport, then this title is for you. It keeps you occupied for hours due to its simplicity, and craving success because one wrong move could be the end of your dream airport, but the addictive gameplay is let down by a lack of sound effects, music, and less-than-average graphics.

Written by: Hayden Nelson