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Rarely has a game simultaneously asked so much yet so little of its players. Nimblebit’s molasses-paced follow-up to Tiny Tower requires a significant time investment, a lot of patience and a tremendous amount of willpower not to spend money on hurrying things along. Yet your input is reduced to the occasional handful of taps, the majority of your time spent waiting for something to happen. In a sense, perhaps that makes it the perfect simulation of the airport experience, though that’s hardly a recommendation.
The objective is to build and develop an airline company, ferrying passengers and cargo between the airports you own. Planes are loaded up and sent to their destinations with the minimum of fuss, and the interface is swift and reasonably intuitive. Refreshingly, after the barest of explanations, you’re left to figure out the intricacies of the game, and unlike Tiny Tower there’s the promise of strategy as you plot the most efficient routes. Fill your plane with passengers and items going to the same destination and you’ll earn a 25% bonus, encouraging the employment of tactical layovers as you shuttle passengers between smaller airports until a group can fly to a distant hub and a bigger financial reward.
But is the effort worth it? Larger planes may travel further but they’re weightier and more expensive to run (which means progression drains resources, nudging you towards IAPs). It’s often a false economy to spread your wings wide regardless: the fares from longer flights might be higher, but several flights between busy airports in closer proximity can produce similar returns. The best reason to offer a transatlantic service is for your own convenience: long-haul flights can take over an hour in real-time to arrive, thus requiring you to play less frequently. It’s fairly worrying that this should prove more appealing than the alternative.
That said, there’s a strong chance Pocket Planes will inveigle its way into your daily routine: those with a strong sense of duty will be unable to resist the perfectly-pitched notification chime that alerts you to an arrival, while the recycling of jokes and banal observations in the game’s frequently-updated social network, BitBook, recaptures (thought doesn’t necessarily build on) Tiny Tower’s charm. With global events offering in-game rewards for communities who team up to service a single destination, it has a shifting short-term goal to keep you checking in, but you may struggle to justify your continued involvement in the long game. [6]