OptiFlight

To me, this is game that is just about puzzles and strategy. No unneeded gimmicks such as excessive ads, currencies, limited time events, mandatory Wi-Fi connection, and so forth. This game feels like it came from the golden era of apps. This game is about it being easy to learn but hard to master. And to me, the extra price is worth the many extra puzzles. You may not spend hours on it, but that is why it is good. It is meant to be challenging and interesting, not addicting. I also love the education element within it. You can learn Airport area codes and geography with this game you create paths from city to city. A weird opinion, but I love the soundtrack as well. The music is fun to listen to.

The core design of the game is solid. You draw a route map by connecting airports together, and upgrade them to increase their possible connections and the rate they send off airplanes at. More destinations and passengers are added as you go through a level, so you change your map to keep up. The biggest obstacle to playing it is that if you fail a stage of a level, you reset to the route map you had at the end of the last stage, not the one you started the stage with. If you’re failing and retrying a stage repeatedly, this leads to a lot of repeated effort, since you have to make all of your changes over again instead of just tweaking a few connections after seeing where your bottlenecks are. It would be better to have an option to go back to the most recent state of your map just before you hit “go” on that stage.

What a creative game. Before I got it, I thought it would be one of those long games where you have to “survive” forever and that’s it. This game was not what I expected it to be (in a very good way!). First of all, there’s no denying the game looks amazing with the simplistic graphics and awesome soundtrack. On top of that, the levels are very cool and unique and somehow get better and better. One level you’re building an air version of the transcontinental railroad, the next you’re trying to deal with a hurricane. Kind of surprising it’s a free game since it has no ads. That being said, I do think there are a couple of things they need to add. I haven’t played the Europe map yet, but I really wish there were more than 2 maps. It was also a missed opportunity that they didn’t add Canada or Mexico cities in the us map. I plan on buying the expansion pack and highly recommend if you like looking at maps; you’ll be looking at them quite a bit in this game.