And you can read what you’re passengers are saying via an in-app riff on Facebook called “BitBook.' Also, the world that you’re building is most definitely yours - these are your airports, your upgrades and your plans in action. When you watch your planes fly, you hear the low-thrum of its engine. When a Push notification goes off, its sound is a cabin ding. The world is cheery and welcoming it’s all smiles and rainbows. Watching an airplane fly, for example, can net you the game’s other currency, “Bux,' which is used to buy things straight-up from the in-game store.Īnd then there are the touches. Every time you unlock a new airplane part, you feverishly check the in-game store for the rest of its constituent parts.Īnd even when you’re not looking forward to that stuff, Pocket Planes rewards. Every time you land a plane, you get one step closer to buying a mega airport in, say, France or New York. It’s this carrot-on-the-stick design approach keeps the simulation engrossing. As you send out more planes and make more money, you’ll level up and receive the ability to purchase more airports and unlock new and roomier airplanes that can ferry more stuff in one go. A neat RPG-style component keeps track of your progress. You can watch your airplanes fly at this point, or you can wait to resume when a real-time timer ends. Heavy chunks of UI tell you what people and pieces of cargo need to go where, and then you click on the location to go. As a tycoon of sorts, you’ll buy airports, upgrade and assemble airplanes, and ferry people and cargo across the globe in an endless effort to earn money in order to continue doing the above.

Functionally, it’s a game about taking stuff to places in airplanes. Pocket Planes is about getting to somewhere, almost anywhere, in an exotic but familiar world full of mimes, astronauts, and headlamps.

In this age of F2P, games are starting to feel more like business models with graphics. It isn’t a pushy game, and its systems are balanced to benefit the user. It avoids all of the common pitfalls of free-to-play design by executing on the simplest of concepts: providing fun without a fee. This is a game that does almost everything right plus, it’s free, so just … try it.īut for me, Pocket Planes says something. It offers a character-rich and fluid world to explore and become a part of, and its mechanics have a soul.

Pocket Planes is a tremendous, cohesive game that can appeal to your lizard brain as well as its strategy can stroke the intellectual part.

Pocket planes