Airline Tycoon 2 Demo

As everyone is aware by now, airplanes are not exactly cheap to build and maintain, because they contain thousands of components and they must keep a few hundred people safe 30,000 feet in the air for several hours. Once you add up the airports as well, it should be no wonder that it’s not very cheap to fly nowadays, although mostly everyone can afford it in one form or another.

Airline Tycoon 2 is a comical economic simulation game that allows you to experience the hardships of being in charge of such a company, by playing the role of the CEO. Hence, you must keep an eye on everything regarding the planes, the airport, and many other factors that influence the way people see your airway. Otherwise, no clients means no money, and bankruptcy is always lurking around the corner.

As the title clearly suggests, this is actually a sequel, which implies the existence of a first part. If you managed to play that one, then you are liable to be extremely disappointed by this second entry in the series, because the developers did a pretty poor job at designing this. In fact, this is more of a remake than a new episode, but not even that saved the game from being quite terrible.

Although most of the elements have been ported from the original release, they do not feel as nice as they did back then, mostly because the new technology used during development causes a lot of technical problems. Probably the most annoying of them is the fact that the loading screens are in much greater numbers, and they are far longer as well. Not only that, but even you are not staring at a loading screen, everything moves rather slowly and the interface is counter-intuitive.

If you keep at it and try to dig until you hit the fun part, you might eventually strike something, but it’s not enough to be worth the effort. The 3D graphics are probably the only real improvement of the game, but they are not breathtaking in any way, so it’s not really a good explanation for the rest of the gameplay. Thankfully, some of the humor remained intact, but not even that lasts for too long.

Airline Tycoon 2 had a lot of good elements to work with, but it somehow ruined everything it touched. Thus, unless you really want to push your stress limits, there aren’t too many reasons to switch to the newer version and just stick with the original release.