izigame.me

>>> I've played for a while and would recommend it if you want to simulate bottlenecks visually vs an economy downturn on maybe 3% of the screen. What do I mean? Normally in your tycoon, if something doesn't work you lose profits and it's not always apparent why the issue is happening at scale but there might be a reaction which might end your run. This game throws it in your face with dups zipping around enraged and clearly showing early game bottlenecks (ticketing, security, plane loading and baggage handling). However, if you have 90% approval rating then dezone security for a day or two that satisfaction will go down to maybe 60%. If you're not broke (and a loan can fix this), you can have it back up to 90% in 2-3 days. No lingering effects.
This scales up quite well as you add more services. However, after a while the game devolves spectacularly into repetitive garbage.. Wait what, doesn't that describe almost every tycoon? Not really. The tech tree is finished very quickly and it is not immediately clear what you've gained by it. No discernible milestones just an easier way to scale. Game pacing often will put in a cutscene to show you what you really accomplished or why you should feel proud, this game doesn't do this. What's a really good example? Body scanners are supposedly better, but counter intuitively they suck and basic metal detectors and remote baggage scanners take their place. You only need to use the body scanners for dedicated terminals where the airline demands it.
Perhaps consider airline services progression. At a certain point you need to give offices to 10 airline executives which likely requires you to add another floor (or sublevel) to accommodate it which costs a pretty penny. So you do this nonsense, and then what is the reward... EAN (or overnight flights) which is frankly underwhelming as you're already filling up 3 other time segments. While the payments for these flights are slightly higher and the offices fairly easy to accommodate once your airport is done was it worth it?
Baggage claim is a fantastic example. 6-8 gates can be supported by 2 carousels which may piss off some dups as they leave the airport. However, player satisfaction isn't really impacted enough and to balance their frustration/hunger you just give them kiosks and vending machines and they go nuts throwing money at you. The ratio isn't necessarily wrong, once you have boosters on your hubs those will hold up quite a bit. Rails and higher bus frequency will also allow higher throughput so maybe invest in this.... OR just create a super annoying corridor maze (picture a hedge garden maze) to keep the boarding zone and pickup areas uncongested.
Should you buy the game, maybe but the game is abandoned afaik and realistically would require an overhaul of pretty much all mechanics (such as the fact that you can put a runway directly facing your 3-4 story airport with perhaps a hangar directly in front of that and guess what... the planes can still take off and never crash horribly. This is probably true IRL depending on runway length but just lol at the fact that you can get away with it.
Random events somewhat breaks the monotony up, but meh it's very easy to compensate. Maybe it's just because I've played a lot simulators that I can nitpick this much about it, but I think once you play the game for like 15 hours, you've more or less seen everything. 30-70 hours for a massive airline, etc. but once money is no longer a concern and given that there really isn't much of a quest progression pretty much all dread you may have had early game is gone. Many games suffer from this and it would have been great if there had been more attention to detail and expansion of the game play via DLCs or overhaul mods.
So to close, buy it if you want a management sim with not a lot of depth where you can force your passengers to relive the dread you once experienced at an airport, and definitely don't buy full price abandonware. This is irrespective of when the game released vs now. Balance patches and bug fixes are not hard to do and don't require months of a developers time unless the game is fundamentally broken and even then you can apply a correction pro-grammatically which masks the issue and makes players happy till you eliminate the bug and can remove oneline nonsense like this.
... while(dup.routing) { if(dup.positiontype === 'dismantle') { recalc_route(dup); } } <--- passengers getting stuck on dismantling wall segments maybe?