What I initially thought would be a bit like Mini Motorways and Mini Metro, it's similar only really in style and name, but Mini Airways is a different and challenging beast that will keep your undivided attention. Note: key provided by the developer.
Cheekily pinching the naming style from Dinosaur Polo Club, CCC Games and Erabit have crafted something truly quite interesting here. You're an air traffic controller, directing planes around each map. Starting off nice and slow, the complexity builds up carefully but quite quickly to really pull your interest in.
While the presentation is very much like Motorways and Metro, here you have more direct-control. Instead of placing lines constantly between points, you're clicking and dragging aeroplanes to a specific angle, or towards a specific point and hoping you don't cause your name to enter newspapers as the worst air traffic controller in history as you smash planes together like a child's toy.
Once you've directed a plane to a landing site, you'll then need to place it down again from the bottom bar onto the runway to get it to take off again. This is where you then direct it to the correct coloured point. As you progress on a map it will gradually zoom out, revealing more coloured points to direct taking off planes towards, and it will continually throw more planes to deal with at you.
This does get a little complicated when you've got numerous planes flying towards points, wanting to land and take off. You've got to get a lot of timing right, but there's plenty of space left for errors and being able to quickly click and drag to divert any plane in any direction makes it pretty darn easy to do so. The interface and tutorial are wonderfully clear on all the controls.
Part of what makes it tricky is getting the angle of planes lined up. You can't just click a plane halfway across the map to a runway, because they may not have the angle needed from that position, so you need to get them closer where they can swing around. Keeping in mind you'll have a bunch of other planes flying around too, often being in each others way.
Thankfully, you do get some upgrades to help you deal with the air traffic. It all depends on what you feel you need at the time.
More situations will appear that you need to deal with, like failed landings, so even when you think you've got things ticking-over nicely, you might suddenly have to deal with a plane you thought you had already dealt with and get it to swing back around for another attempt. When you've already got a bunch lined up to land, this will require you to think again and quickly too. It will constantly keep your attention.
Each map provides its own slightly different test too from multiple runways, to mountains and more. Add to that the random events you can get, there's a really nice challenge to it. Overall I think this is a game that's well worth picking up that you can play for hours on end.
With the custom maps and modding support too, no doubt it will have some fun stuff made for it.
Available with Native Linux support on Steam.
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