Aero Porter (3DS eShop) Review

Have you ever wondered what kind of fun the employees of an Airliner get to experience every day?  Even more so, the unbridled experience of sorting bags? Well great news for you, as Level 5 have made a game that will make you hate the entire concept of living out those dreams, and it doesn’t even touch on the infamous customer service that tends to crush the soul of even the most optimistic of individuals. Yes, it’s not all $8 bottles of water and stale sandwiches – it can be so much more.

In Aero Porter, you take control of the luggage sorting carousels, each stacked on top of the other like a wedding cake of sorts – a complex, swirling, never ending wedding cake. Each layer represents a different plane, which is the goal location for the luggage that needs to be sorted in order for that flight to take off. You are tasked with sorting the various bags according to their colour (indicative of which flight they belong to) on conveyor belts through the lowering/raising of ramps using the shoulder buttons of your 3DS. This puts each bag onto a different path, and when the belt has only the right coloured bags corresponding to the flight on it, you can send the plane off on its merry way.

It sounds fairly simple, and to be fair, the first few levels are. But the difficulty really steps up with each level, becoming more of an exercise in frustration than fun. Additional belts are added on, more bags enter the mix, and now there’s less time to sort them! Quite possibly the most devious gameplay mechanic involves the management of power/fuel levels for the conveyor belts. You can choose to run the belts faster or dim the lights (making it harder to see what is being sorted) in the name of conserving energy, or get most flights out the door.

Add in a few VIP flights that need to go out before the others, and you have the recipe for post-traumatic stress disorder on your hands. That being said, there is a little fun to be had in Aero Porter – it’s just not very balanced. The developers do a great job of making a potentially fun game feel like work, while also keeping it fresh and challenging (if only for a little while), but ultimately it’s just not enough to keep you interested for a long period of play due.

The gameplay becomes horribly unbalanced as you progress – the limited controls end up hampering the sheer complexity of what is being thrown at you. While the idea is unique, it fails to really strike a cord with the player – it simply increases the amount of multitasking and micromanagement to the point where, after the first hour of play, the game is no longer fun. I’m not saying that Aero Porter is an entirely bad experience and that you won’t find any worth in it, but just be aware that this is a game that will not appeal to the mass market. The learning curve/execution level is just a little too extreme for most.

As for the aesthetics, this game could easily be released on practically any platform; this is partially because the visuals are very simple, but also because there are no 3D effects at all – it is an entirely 2D experience.  It is all serviceable, however it doesn’t really do much that sets it apart from the field in terms of design.

The audio is an even duller affair. You will spend the vast amount of your time simply listening to the mechanical churn of carousels going around. No music, few sound effects, and that’s about it… Oh, there’s also the sound of a plane taking off! So fire up your music player of choice while you’re sorting luggage, because you certainly won’t miss anything on the audio front.

This game doesn’t quite work as a stand-alone, and I get the feeling that it would be better marketed as part of a package deal (i.e. the Guild01 game it was bundled into for the Japanese release). Aero Porter could have become something very special, but ultimately it falls flat due to average execution. I’m not saying that you’ll hate it – it’s certainly an interesting concept. That being said, you can’t hold a game up simply on a concept – gameplay is key to a title of this nature. I’m sure most people will play for an hour or so and then never touch it again, simply because it’s too hard or they’ve lost interest in the idea. On the plus side, a standard price of $6.50 means that it’s not a big gamble if you want to give it a try.