Board Thread:Game Discussion/@comment-9234979-20130603164644

I downloaded Pocket Planes to grub a measly 5 Mobacoins for use in Transformers Legends and figured I'd just delete it afterwards like the rest of the games they've bribed me to download. It even looked extra stupid with its Playskool-looking 8 bit art. But I thought I had to do the tutorial to get the Mobacoins so I did. It has turned out to be a strangely satisfying, non-stressful, and addictive game and now the art is just incidental. I like it so much better than leveling in Transformers between events! While it's addictive, it's also passive, or can be if you want. If you leave it alone for an hour or a day or a week, hey, who cares. It'll be there ready to go when you're ready. I'll keep playing Transformers but this is a nice break.

SUMMARY You run an airline and your job is to get people and cargo where they need to go for a fee and rack up profit as you expand around the world. You start off with four planes, two tiny ones with one cargo or one person slot apiece, and two small ones with two slots apiece (later, bigger planes can carry both people and cargo). You select the best-paying fares you can at a given airport and then send a plane on its way and then go do something else, whether setting up other planes, upgrading or shopping, tracking your fleet's progress on the air traffic map, or doing something in real life away from the phone. Some flights are only a few minutes while others can be much longer, and they just take care of themselves in the background. By default, they alert you when they get to their destination, but you can turn off alerts if you'd like to play more passively and not be bothered. You can view your fleet status overview at any time to see all at once where each plane is and what its status or ETA is.

UPGRADES As you earn points and money from your fares, you use it to buy access to other airports within flight range, upgrade your planes, buy or assemble new planes, ground or scrap underperforming planes, or upgrade airports to allow more options. It's Mobage, so of course you have the option of in-game purchases of in-game gold, but I haven't done that since it's more of a passive enjoyable thing than the fierce competition and pressure of Transformers Legends.

MAP/AIRPORTS/EXPANSION My game started off in the northeast of the USA and parts of southeast Canada - not sure if everyone starts in the same place on the map. But the whole world is available to expand into. Airport access in cities with tiny populations comes very cheap, like even barely more than $1,000 gold, while huge metropolises like NYC are very expensive, like nearly $50,000, and there's everything in between, roughly scaled to real life populations I guess. You have to think about the range of your planes when you pick which new airports to add. You can do multi-leg flights if the range between any two given cities is too far for a given plane, but you have to make sure at least some of your planes but ideally all of them have enough range to make the longest leg. A new airport in a new area opens up your access to other nearby airports if/once you can afford to buy access in them.

At first you'll try to open up airports that are as far away from your home cluster as possible because you'll realize the extra distance will get you higher fares. Sometimes you have two things that need to go to two different places and you do a two-leg trip and drop one off along the way. But after a while you realize you need to be more strategic when picking from among the available fares at any given airport. It may make sense to fly a substantially shorter route for less money because you might be able to do two routes and get paid twice during the same time you'd only get paid once for that longer route, and ultimately make more money per hour. You can check a screen that shows you your average profit per hour per plane to see if you're making better choices over time, check the total time a plane has been in the air, etc.

PLANES You can also use points/money to upgrade your planes in terms of fuel/range, speed, and weight. You can buy new and better planes that let you do more stuff, farther away, and faster. You can assemble planes from parts, or sell parts that you got for free when opening a new airport. You can do paint jobs and make your little people wear different outfits, but blah blah who cares - profit and global expansion are where it's at!

EVENTS You can participate in special events where I think you try to hit the most number of deliveries in a certain time period for prize money (haven't done one yet). Maybe their are other goals or prizes, not sure yet.

Anyway try it out if you're interested. I'm enjoying it. Unlike non-episode Transformers after you've done all the missions, there's always something new, lots of variability, and multiple tracks of progression, all in a pleasant and casual atmosphere. Bon voyage! 