Great for a hour
I love airline games like this but there is 2 things I don’t like about this one. First is that the game is WAY to easy I do the hardest everything and it’s still so easy. The last thing is that the airport ratings are very inconsistent. Overall a great game for a beginner in this type of game or have a hour or 2 to spend.
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Promising airline route and budget manager
There's a lot to like about Sky Empire. It has a clear, clean, straightforward design. You and your competitors each start with a pile of cash to start an airline: buy or lease planes (based on real models available in a given year--you can start as early as 1960), arrange seats in different classes, then use the map to assign them to routes anywhere in the world, using data estimating demand for cities and routes by type of traveller, and set prices for each class of ticket. I really like the balance between detail--you can even set budget options for advertising, investment in staff training and passenger comfort--and simplicity--there's no useless in-app purchases like customizing your logo, no locking regions of the map, no animation showing planes moving around, etc. Once you've set your routes and prices, you tap Next and and instantly a month passes: you can see how much money you earned or lost on each route, and even look at exactly what your competitors are doing by selecting them in the dashboard. Buy or lease new planes if you want, adjust your prices and routes, and repeat for the next month.
Sky Empire does feel incomplete as a game, however. Even with stiff competition--in the couple games I've started so far, all the AI airlines increase their net worth by between 40% to 100% per year(!)--it's not clear what you're playing for. If you can stay profitable, the game lets you continue, month after month. Maybe scenarios would be a good addition: e.g. bring Pan Am back to profitability, or bring a low-cost European airline in 2000 to the top of the market by 2020, etc. Or some goals: reach $1 billion in market value in 5 years. There are a few small issues also. It's easy to look at any available airport or route on the map to see what the demand is like there, but there's no obvious way to filter or compare them. I don't think the difficulty levels affect the strength of the AI airlines, just your initial budget.
Still, it's such a huge improvement over the other airline games out there, too many of which are drudgery; bloated graphics covering over a time-sucking adware or in-app purchase wasteland.
Sky Empire does feel incomplete as a game, however. Even with stiff competition--in the couple games I've started so far, all the AI airlines increase their net worth by between 40% to 100% per year(!)--it's not clear what you're playing for. If you can stay profitable, the game lets you continue, month after month. Maybe scenarios would be a good addition: e.g. bring Pan Am back to profitability, or bring a low-cost European airline in 2000 to the top of the market by 2020, etc. Or some goals: reach $1 billion in market value in 5 years. There are a few small issues also. It's easy to look at any available airport or route on the map to see what the demand is like there, but there's no obvious way to filter or compare them. I don't think the difficulty levels affect the strength of the AI airlines, just your initial budget.
Still, it's such a huge improvement over the other airline games out there, too many of which are drudgery; bloated graphics covering over a time-sucking adware or in-app purchase wasteland.
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Absolutely love this game !
I wanna start off by saying thanks for having a dark UI the dark blue is a nice color scheme. A few things that would be cool to see in future updates, airline bids for mergers / buy outs/ stock market. I also would like to be able to purchase a few assets such as fuel farms or maintenance hangers to reduce the cost from fuel and aircraft maintenance. I think a cool addition would be can we add features to our aircraft such as the old 757s came with no winglets as well as the 767 but over time can it be an upgrade option to reduce fuel consumption? (The 75 and 76 were just examples) there’s more aircraft that came with no winglets back then. Also can we see our aircraft flying the routes on the map instead of just a colored line ? Another feature that would be cool is bag prices and carry on fees WiFi fees etc basically what differentiates a ULL to a Legacy carrier please.
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Response from developer
Thanks so much for the kind words and the detailed feedback! At the moment, I’m mainly focused on getting the fundamentals of the game right and improving the core experience. That said, all of your suggestions are noted. Features like asset purchases, aircraft customization, route visualization, and better differentiation between low-cost and legacy carriers are definitely interesting ideas and hopefully some of them can be released in future updates. Thanks again for playing and supporting the game!
