Slim Gaming - Airport CEO

Well, after a three-year hiatus, it’s finally time to return to my Slim Gaming series, where I review games from the viewpoint of running them on a weaker machine. I have long since sold my trusty old MacBook Air, and am now running a pretty decent 2017 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, however this still isn’t much of a gaming machine, especially when it comes to running all-time favourites of mine, such as Cities Skylines. It does however run a number of other gems, and in this article, I’ll be taking a look at one of my current favourites: 

Airport CEO

Now, as I’ve stated a few times on this blog, I’m a plane nut. Some people also say I’m plain nuts, but I’ll leave that to you to decide. Anyway, I’ve had jet fuel running through my veins ever since I was a little boy, and while aircraft of all shapes and sizes are certainly interesting, I’ve always found airports as such much more fascinating. I’ve lost count of how many hours I spent at numerous airports of all shapes and sizes, from Klagenfurt in Austria, to Prague and finally to the behemoth that is Frankfurt airport, just watching the comings and goings, and the seemingly ceaseless activity on the ramp, with all kinds of weird and wonderful equipment zipping every which way. I found myself transfixed by the well-choreographed ballet of ground vehicles preparing an aircraft for departure. Even up to the beginning of the COVID-19 related shutdown of most of the aviation industry, this fascination did not diminish, and even as a “seasoned” business traveller, I found myself often just watching the comings and goings on the aircraft stands outside.

Taking a step back from my own nostalgic memories, airports are some of the largest and most complex systems developed by mankind. Even a small airport such as Kerry or Klagenfurt will inevitably sport a runway several kilometres long, an will easily handle several hundred passengers at once, while major international hub airports such as Frankfurt or Amsterdam will be almost labyrinthine in their complexity, having more aircraft stands and gates on one pier than many small countries have in their entire airport network. Building and managing these masterpieces of organisation is a massive undertaking, with massive opportunities for engaging gameplay and challenging mechanics.

Yet for some reason, this rather wide field was mostly ignored by the wide field of management / tycoon games. Granted, there was the Airport Tycoon series of games in the late 1990s. But while I may have played the original game in that series for years on end, it wasn’t a particularly well made title, and is rightly mostly forgotten. A whole host of “airport” themed games burst on the scene with the advent of mobile gaming, but most of them were just poor quality clones of “social” city builders, deserving of all the disgust that goes with that phrase.

Things changed in 2016, when Airport CEO popped up on Steam Greenlight. While the concept looked simple enough, a top-down airport management game, the developers promised a deep simulation of every aspect of airport operations. The game was finally released as Early Access in September 2017, just when I had a lot of other things to worry about. It has seen continued development ever since. Developer Apoapsis Studios, based out of Malmö in Sweden, is regularly adding major new features and gameplay mechanics to the game, with larger aircraft, de-icing services and a completely new research mechanic having been implemented recently, and a separation of domestic & international flights, multiple terminals and self-service check-in for passengers about to be rolled out or in advanced stages of testing. For a studio that is working on its first title, this type of commitment is absolutely impressive. I've also uploaded a review of it on my YouTube channel, so why not check that out as well?

Before we get into the juicy details, let’s have a quick look at the system requirements:

Minimum System Requirements

• OS: Windows 8/OS X High Sierra

• CPU: Intel Core2Duo 2.4 GHz/AMD 3 GHz (Windows) / Intel Core i5 2.7GHz (OS X)

• RAM: 2GB

• Graphics: Minimum 2GB VRAM

• Storage: 2GB

Nothing too spectacular there, though as I mentioned, this game also ran on my 2012 MacBook Air, albeit with significantly reduced settings. Any semi decent notebook should be able to run this game, especially since it doesn’t require a dedicated GPU.

Gameplay

As with all good games, the basic principle is deceptively simple: You start with a plot of land and your job is to turn it from a general aviation field with a grass runway barely long enough to handle a Cessna Skylane into a major international gateway, or any type of airport you wish. You have a free choice of locations. Want to make the aborted Everglades Jetport work? Go ahead! Want to give your little village in southern France a regional airport? Why not? You want to try whether an Irish Midlands airport would actually work? Knock yourself out!

Getting an airport to be this size takes quite a bit of time and effort. 

You have control over every aspect of the airport, from major economical decisions, like which airlines, fuel providers or even construction firms to sign contracts with, to the design and layout of the terminal, roadways and parking lots, runways, taxiways and aircraft stands, right down to which candidates to hire to man the check in desks, security checkpoints or clean the toilets, and even further down to the colour of every single seat in the departure lounge, if you so wish. The aim is deceptively simple as well: Operate your airport at a profit. However, the very fact that even large airports in real life often need state support should tell you that all this is easier said than done. 

The learning curve is pretty steep. Okay, the first phase isn’t really that complex. You start by signing a contract with a construction company, having their workers bused to the airport site, and then laying down a runway, taxiway, and a few small aircraft stands and a small control tower. That’s all you need to start serving general aviation flights, meaning private pilots with small aircraft like the aforementioned Cessna 172/182 Skylane, Piper Cub, or Piper PA-28 Archer, or Beech 58. Providing fuel service to serve these aircraft isn’t really that difficult either. Just plop down a small fuel tank, buy a tanker truck that moves so slow that it was probably considered out of date in 1970s soviet Russia, and you’re good to go. Oh, and don’t forget to sign a contract with an aviation fuel supplier to provide you with the required Avgas 100LL.

It's these small aircraft, like the DHC-6 Twin Otter above or the Beech 1900D below, that will likely operate the first scheduled flights at your airport.

It's small General Aviation aircraft such as these that will be your first source of income when you start your airport.

Things get complex once you start offering commercial flights. The first scheduled flights will be operated using aircraft that aren’t much bigger than the general aviation planes I mentioned earlier, mainly Cessna 208 Grand Caravans, DHC-6 Twin Otters, or Beech 1900D. All relatively easy to handle. However, now you need a terminal, passenger service agents, security staff and ramp agents to supervise the turnaround of these scheduled flights. Oh, and you’ll need additional fuel depots and tanker trucks. These commercial flights are all operated by aircraft that can’t use the fuel that you’ve been selling to general aviation flights. Their turboprop engines require Jet A1 fuel.

Larger aircraft such as these require significantly more services than the smaller general aviation aircraft.

Luggage handling, pushback trucks, stair trucks, all these are required to service these larger aircraft. And yes, that's a FlyBe aircraft parked on the stand to the left. I'm playing with quite a few mods.

The real fun starts when you get to the so-called medium aircraft, which for this game means anything between a 40 seat ATR 42 and a 200 seat Boeing 757-200. You’ll need a larger runway, larger aircraft stands, additional equipment such as pushback tractors or stair trucks, aircraft cleaning and catering services, de-icing, larger security checkpoints and a terminal large enough to handle the larger numbers of passengers, as well as a full baggage handling system and baggage claim areas. At the same time, the passengers will start demanding more services, so you’ll have to provide shops and restaurants in the terminal, ensure that enough car parking spaces, and transport links are available, and so on. Oh, and you’ll need a whole new set of infrastructure for the really large birds like the Airbus A330/340 or the Boeing 747. All the while, you’ll have to ensure that the aircraft can taxi to and from their stands to the runway as efficiently as possible, and that ground vehicles can reach the aircraft stands with minimal delays. Oh, and I hope you upgraded those fuel depots, because those medium aircraft are thirsty!

Your airport will go nowhere without a safe habitat for your staff to relax and your office drones to work!

Ensuring your check in counters are hooked up to the baggage system can be a bit tricky.

Straight through security and into the duty free shops. It's a shitty move, I admit, but hey, it generates revenue!

Baggage claim or, as I like to call it, suitcase roulette is also something you will have to provide.

Every passenger is unique, with their own passport, boarding pass and needs.

The same goes for your staff, who you hire and train individually. Looks like Kirsten here is about to fall asleep standing up, if her energy bar is anything to go by.

The game doesn’t throw all of that at you at once though, thank goodness. Anything that goes beyond handling general aviation flights is unlocked by your airport’s administration staff in the form of R&D projects. You’ll need to acquire a license to handle commercial flights, rent out retail & food concessions in the terminal, or to handle larger aircraft. That way, you can grow your airport at a more sedate pace, rather than trying to build everything up at a breakneck pace. Just make sure that you have enough office space for your administrative staff, as well as later for the other board members that you’ll be hiring, as the research only works when they have a desk to work at. All of the above makes for a hypnotising and enthralling experience, and the satisfaction of watching your airport run like clockwork is something special to be sure, especially when you’re operating with two or more parallel runways. The game feels challenging, but rarely if ever unfair. 

Rough around the edges

That being said, the game is still very clearly in early access. It feels rough around the edges, and there are definite quirks and bugs that need to be ironed out. However, as mentioned earlier, the developers are actively improving the game, and have even linked their public Trello board from one of the developer blog posts on their website so you can check what they’re working on. And in fairness, it feels a lot more solid and well-rounded than some titles pushed out by “big names” in the industry. They’re also pushing out new gameplay mechanics, and I personally can’t wait for multi-terminal support, as I tend to build myself into a corner with my first terminal.

That being said, I do have some genuine gripes with the game. The biggest one for me is scale. Thankfully, Airport CEO has stayed well away from the comic look that its main competitor SimAirport uses. However, the scale is very definitely off. The passengers and ground vehicles are too large in relation to the aircraft, while the runways are definitely way too short. A Boeing 737-800, the type that Ryanair uses, requires at least 1680 meters of runway to operate safely, and even an ATR 72 requires between 800-1000 meters, though the latter can stop in a much shorter distance, as I recently found out when returning to Cork from the UK. The runways in Airport CEO are way too short for that. 

I know that low cost airlines like to pack their passengers into their planes like sardines but still, something is off about the scale here.

If those runways seem a little short to you, you're not alone. They definitely are!

The scale issue extends to the game area, which once again is way too small to build a semi-realistic airport. You can unlock up to four squares in a 2x2 arrangement and in fact you’ll need to do so when moving up to medium aircraft, as the medium runway is too large to fit in the opening square, but you’ll reach the limits of the game world faster than you think, especially with your first terminal, which will invariably be connected to the original airport due to the need to serve small aircraft. 

Then, there are the routes operated from your airport, more specifically the aircraft that operate on these routes. I’m not going to argue about the technical feasibility of some of those routes in real life, but some certainly don’t make any commercial sense, especially in the early phases of the game. Okay, operating a Beech 1900D between an airport in the Irish Midlands and Doncaster/Sheffield Airport in the UK doesn’t seem that far-fetched. A 20-seater is just about the right size for that, the cabin is pressurised and the plane is reasonably fast. Vienna to Bremen on a DHC-6 Twin Otter though? The Twotter may be a great aircraft for bush flying operations, but that route would just be torture for the passengers. And flying from Dublin to Faro in Portugal with a Cessna Grand Caravan? I’m pretty sure that’s a violation of the Geneva Convention right there!

In all seriousness, some of the pairings don’t really make sense, and I hope some work is being done on that. Ideally, you wouldn’t force passengers to sit in a Grand Caravan or Twin Otter for more than 45 minutes if you can at all avoid it. Also, when it comes to modding, some pairings really don’t work. While seeing Irish airline Aer Lingus fly to Malaga isn’t really unusual, this makes no sense if they’re operating from Česke Budejovice! Likewise, KLM flying between Ireland and Azerbaijan is completely nonsensical. This may not affect the games default airlines such as Air Strada, SkyFly, or Trinity Aviation, but for a game designed around modding, there really should be some provision to force certain airlines to operate to or from certain regions or countries only. 

You'll spend a lot of time in the flight planner, trying to fit in every single flight your airline clients want to operate. Once again, this screenshot comes from a game that uses mods, hence the presence of the likes of FlyBe, KLM, and Aer Fungus, I mean Aer Lingus.

Then, there are the notifications. These can really get overwhelming, with every single delay spawning multiple such notifications. While this can be manageable with a small airport with maybe four small and two. Medium aircraft stands, this is going to be totally overwhelming on larger airports with large numbers of gates, especially when they operate a packed schedule. And you get notifications for all kinds of stuff, from changes in weather, to contract notifications, emails, go-arounds for general aviation aircraft, and all that kind of stuff. Delay management shouldn’t even be something for the head of an airport to contend with. This is usually handled by air traffic control, the operations department of the airline in question and the station manager or handling agent of the airline, which is something that the developers should implement in due time.

Now, reading back through the above, it may seem like I have major issues with the game, but honestly, nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve spent hours and hours playing that game, and will likely sink countless more hours into it. It is already a great game, challenging but fair. Most of the issues above probably won’t even be noticeable to anyone who doesn’t pour Jet A1 into their coffee in the morning, or who don’t mod their game. Plus, there’s something extremely satisfying to just sit back and watch the activity at your airport. Aircraft taxiing to the active runway for take-off, a flight to Malaga pushing back from a remote stand while an inbound flight from Bremen turns into its stand at the terminal, while on the next stand over, a flight to Southend is boarding. Meanwhile, passengers are making their way through security, browsing the shops in the terminal, or grabbing a bite to eat in a café, while ground vehicles zip every which way, preparing to service the next flight going to some far-flung destination. Yep, it feels strangely familiar.