Airport CEO should be a slam dunk of a game for me. I love tycoon games, I love management games, I love airports and airlines. What a shame that this is one of the most slogging tycoon games I've ever played.

Somewhere along the way of trying to make a faithful replication of what it's like to run an airport, the devs of Airport CEO forgot what would make it fun to play as the CEO of an airport in a video game. There's lots of neat stuff and cool things happening. And then there's lot of absolutely frustrating and maddeningly annoying nonsense.

The cool stuff: making deals with airlines and seeing airliners fly in. Watching the passengers mill about and visit shops and go about their lives is cool. Managing the several elements of air travel and such is fun at least in concept. De-icing pads and airplane hangars, taxiways, navigating traffic.

The awful stuff: most of the rest of the game. The UI is not ideal. Too many floating menus that disappear too quickly if you don't hover over them the right way. Placing many things takes too many clicks or isn't obvious at all. There's just too much fiddly nonsense to take care of that makes pursuing longer play throughs painfully arduous. Navigating baggage layouts is absolutely brutal and forces you to play more civil engineer than it does letting you play the game. While no doubt there's a bit of charm to navigating every square inch of where your bags will and won't go it ultimately is a brutal task made worse by the need to also navigate multiple kinds of scanner security and create a special receptacle for the baggage bay so the bags can be carried away by the baggage trucks to the planes.

Sure, is that realistic? I suppose. Is it any fun? No. Not at all. It's pretty miserable, in fact. The direction of a conveyor belt is fixed when it's placed so in order to change its direction you have to delete the piece and replace another. But you can't delete it or build over it while the conveyor belt tool is selected. You have to click the bulldozer, delete the belt then reopen the conveyor belt tool and build. Doing this as you plan out a conveyor system in any airport of any size is absolutely one of the most miserable experiences I can remember in gaming.

Imagine in Rollercoaster Tycoon if you had to build specific supply chains for where your mechanics would get their tools from. Or needed to create a supply chain and special route to get the umbrellas to the umbrella stand. At some point the game takes on a different character. Is this Factorio or is this something like Rollercoaster Tycoon or Planet Zoo? It feels like it should be and is supposed to be the latter but the devs kinda accidentally built the former.

Because you also need to do a similar task when building taxiways and runways. It's all just such a pain in the ass. It's so fiddly. And you'll redo many of these as you grow your airport. Making you spend tons of time with the game's shittiest mechanics. It's not at all like redoing paths or moving rides or exhibits in Planet Zoo or Rollercoaster Tycoon. It's much more like finding optimal paths for factories in Factorio or Dyson Sphere Project. Which is an altogether different game and different style of game. And Airport CEO doesn't provide you with the same tools as those games, or the same incentive.

The whole game would be infinitely better with template pieces or set pieces that handle much of this activity behind the scenes in some sense. Plop down a baggage claim and have it just work itself. Simplify taxiways and runways to be placed in just a few clicks. You can still leave some of these things to be done by hand by those who really want such an experience. But it's so damn fiddly for those that want to get into the tycoon aspects, it's a bitch to ever get there.

And these are just a handful of examples. Zoning, construction, roadways are all also similarly a pain in the ass. And any big airport has to do all of this. You're going to be dealing with all of this often and you'll need to redo them often as you grow the airport in size. There's no real future proofing. All of this annoying attention to detail and the game still doesn't manage with allowing you to build intricate multi terminal systems or between terminal travel. No plane-trains or disaggregated security systems.

The game runs well. There's little lag. I like the graphic style which blends the right amount of realistic looking set pieces and planes with its cartoon passengers. There's plenty to enjoy. Building a little general aviation county airstrip is fun and avoids most of the headache. But the game clearly wants you to flex your muscles in building a much larger airport and it can just about handle that fine until you have to dig into each of these fiddly, too specific and enraging bits that take you too far away from tycoon management and into something more like Mini Metro or Cities Skylines or Factorio where you're managing traffic flow and supply chains but with a shoddy UI full of too many clicks and too little detail