Welcome to Airline Empires, where you can run a virtual airline and compete against hundreds of other players just like you! This is the game for you. Oct 01, 2002 Airlines 2 PC at GameSpy - Check out the latest Airlines 2 cheats, cheat codes, walkthroughs, guides, videos and more! I really wanted to like Airlines 2. It is basically an updated and improved Air Bucks (if you remember that one). Ms.net Framework 3.0 Sp2 Patch more. I really like Air Bucks, but since it was a DOS game.

Airlines is an underrated airline management sim from Interactive Vision (who is actually hard at work on Airlines 2, slated for an early 2002 release).

Airlines Two probably would have liked to call itself Airline Tycoon, but that title was already taken. The player in this solitaire game starts with a basic amount of capital and must invest in aircraft, geographical research, and the stock market to survive and build the strongest airline. Airlines Two calls itself a management simulation, but like many games of this type, it ends up being more of a spreadsheet simulation.

Smooth Takeoff The strength of Airlines Two is that it's technically competent. The game has a small footprint, relatively light system requirements, and it's stable. It also sports a clean and uncluttered interface. The documentation is decent and covers the basics, though the creators could have made the illustrations larger and added more thorough tutorials and strategy sections. Beyond that, however, there is little to the game. With a business sim, players are looking for something a little more cerebral and educational, but still want some entertainment value. These games tend to be more open-ended like SimCity, where success is seeing an empire grow in terms of money, population, stock value, or some other quantifier.

The presence of competition or mission-based milestones can add a sense of urgency to the proceedings, but general play is rewarding because the player is interested in the focused and often leisurely act of building. Airlines Two certainly satisfies the need to build, but it seems a bit soulless. Generating an income requires quickly establishing routes. The victory conditions are configurable by the user at the beginning of each game, but this doesn't add the variety to the play one might suspect.

That's because whether the goal is to have the most valuable airline, the largest number of routes, the highest respect, or some combination of those factors, the game plays the same and requires roughly the same steps to succeed. It's a race to build routes, upgrade planes, and expand the company faster than the competition, but the methods for doing so don't vary much from game to game. AI operated competitors are fast workers and push the player, yet play isn't terribly challenging even with the occasional random disaster. There are some decisions players need to make about how much debt they are willing to incur, but as long as each airline is making decent decisions the cash flows in with ease, stunting the usually fearsome loan debt. Any strategy for investing in the stock market is also weak because of the same reason; all the stocks are successful except for the few airlines that enter the market late.

Playing the market gives the early entrants little decisive advantage until later when possibly buying out one of the smaller companies. Micro-Management Simulation As the game progresses, players hold a larger number of routes, airplanes, and airport offices. It becomes a huge number of details to manage when the player's airline reaches a few dozen routes. Tuning routes for profitability, scouting new territories, keeping the air fleet maintained, and handling the occasional crash or labor crisis are realistic duties of running an airline, but they're also tedious ones, those that a smart manager would delegate to subordinates. A 3D globe is the Airlines Two's main map interface. There's no such help for the user in Airlines Two. Instead of adjusting budgets for departments like marketing, research and development, and labor management as players might in games like Civilization, SimCity 3000, or Rollercoaster Tycoon, the player has to do it all, even when he has hundreds of routes and aircraft around the world.