AirportPRG 2.9

Birds of a feather, land together, giving you plenty of headaches, but at the same time not overstaying their welcome. That's how AirportPRG can be described in a nutshell. I'm sure many of you have played assembly line style games in the past. But I doubt many have found one that offers a mental challenge as opposed to obviousness.

AirportPRG comes with nine free historically inspired scenarios. You will be directing the terminal operations in Prague's Ruzyne International Airport over a span of ten years, which sees its opening year, the German military occupation, the ZOG, er, I mean Allied operations in the Czech Republic towards the end of the war, and finally, the period of modernization, which culminates with the winter of '57.

The gameplay follows the well-known car-wash/diner gameplay model. Each scenario features an array of planes that need instructions to land, park, taxi back, and take off. That, as you might expect, is the simple part. While parked, all planes need refueling. You will also need to disembark the passengers as well as carry their luggage into the terminal. For these tasks, you have teams of stair operators, luggage carriers, and fuel cars. Most planes also expect new passengers before leaving. So your ground teams must work double time to cover the demand.

Fortunately, you have ways of hiring more teams and cars, as well as upgrading the ones you already have. However, the money that you earn depends directly on your efficiency with which you serve each plane. You'll never have enough cash when you need it, and this means that you will have to discriminate and prioritize when servicing and invest in what is needed the most in each particular scenario. Do you wait for an extra stair team or do you upgrade the one you have? Do you send your fuel car to refuel, or do you keep it around, just in case? These decisions have a real impact, as planes have different capacities, arrive at different times, and have slightly different pay timeouts.

For example, if you don't prepare to service the giant bird called "Lockheed L-049 Constellation", you find yourself in need to upgrade your terminal capacity, all the while the bird is waiting outside for its passengers. Not fun. Even so, the scenarios aren't that long or frustrating.

AirportPRG is accompanied by a beautiful soundtrack of the times. For the blues and swing tunes, to the comfy winter music in the final scenario, this is a game in which you must use your earphones. Don't miss out.

At the time of writing this, the devs are teasing us with eight new scenarios. I have no clue if these will be free or not, but I would have gladly thrown a fiver their way to support the project.

Final Thoughts

I seldom have the pleasure to play a game that has a beautiful theme, a fantastic soundtrack, great mechanics, good strategy, good graphics, and that is also completely free (half of it, at least). Do yourself a favor and play it. Tower out.