Imagine having the stress of having to land,co-ordinate,refuel,fix and take off planes on a minute by minute basis? Well Airport Mania is exactly that and Mania is what it seems like. With a rather cartoony clean graphical approach you are in charge of the airport. You must keep up with planes wanting to land while making sure no departures are late! Quite a busy job…

So at only 59p this game will take up your day and when I’ve been playing time seems to fly by! Get it? Fly by? Ah I crack myself up.  Anyway the easy touch interface makes controlling the complicated task really easy, all you have to do is tap on the plane and tap on the destination be it either the terminal gate or the fuel depot.  The only problem is that during the mid and later levels the planes are coming in thick and fast which can get so busy on screen you tap on the wrong destination.  When you’re trying to get all the bonuses by making all the red planes dock with the red terminal it is very annoying when you accidentally tap the wrong colour terminal which is so frustrating!  All your hard work will have been wasted and the way to cancel a command is to double tap the destination but because the screen area is so small you don’t have enough time to cancel it effectively so it’s all a moment of loss….

Airport Mania does combine some kind of RPG elements albeit small, as you can customise your airport at the start of each stage.  You can add another gate, another runway, a spray paint centre, a VIP stand all to improve the speed of the airport process.  To gain these addons you collect money from completing flights early and making sure they’re not late or delayed.  Pretty simple really and it’s not until you get to the really late levels that you will struggle to make 99.9% of your flights early/on time.  As I mentioned earlier Airport Mania employs a colour coding system.  Each plane has a colour and every time you dock the plane to the gate, the gate also changes to that colour.  To start with there are only a couple of colours so it is easy to send all the blue planes to one gate and all the red planes to another gate.  The benefit of this is that you get a points multiplier x2,x3,x4,x5 etc which makes it a lot easier, and in the later levels necessary, to reach the best medals.  When the levels get on they introduce more colours and because you can only have so many gates you have to choose whether to play for bonuses or risk late, or losing altogether, your flights.  This tactical aspect to the game works quite well and is not required at all to enjoy the game for the majority of the levels.

So with more airplane and airport apps flying into the iTunes App Store, is the craze stale?  Well in this case at least, no.  It’s a different genre altogether from XPlane and is more of a puzzle than action game.  Levels aren’t long and tedious which really sucks you in to just play one more level.  The music is cheesy but works well and Airport Mania is full of light entertainment while also putting in some logical technique across 8 airports and 48 levels.  Will you take up the challenge of running an airport’s arrivals/departures? I know I did.