Aero Porter

Genre: Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Aero Porter is an Arcade-style game released on Nintendo 3DS in 2012. This game is, as of this writing, the final release of developer Yoot Saito’s Vivarium, Inc., whose prior works include unusual games like the Dreamcast “Virtual Pet who insults you” game Seaman, and the GameCube Pinball-esque War game Odama. By comparison, Aero Porter is a fairly tame and straightforward game where players sort luggage on airport carousels.

The presentation here is similarly simple and straightforward. Carousels and luggage are presented using visually-simple 3D, with their color designating where the luggage is meant to be delivered to. This is backed by some good atmospheric airport sounds and subdued, forgettable music.

The core gameplay here is quite good, with players raising and lowering ramps on multiple floors of a carousel, trying to time this to ensure that luggage gets carried to the appropriate floor. These ramps all operate in tandem, meaning that lowering the ramp to bring luggage to its proper place on one floor may upset your sorting on a different floor. The challenge here is in juggling all of these floors and their luggage all at once, while a clock is ticking down on the flight wanting to depart.

If this was all there was to this game, it would be a simple but unique and enjoyable Arcade-style game. Unfortunately, players are scarcely even given time to get acquainted with things before the game adds new elements, expanding to additional floors, giving players VIP luggage that needs to be loaded first, mis-marked luggage where you need to ignore the luggage color in favor of its tag, and even energy consumption concerns, as if the multitude of other issues to worry about aren’t enough.

As a result, what starts as a fun and frantic experience here will soon turn into something that feels frustratingly unmanageable. It’s a pity, because I definitely felt like Aero Porter had some strong ideas that made for a lot of good potential as an Arcade-style game. But my time enjoying this game was sadly brief and soon gave way to exasperation, and I expect this will be true for most other players as well.

tl;dr – Aero Porter is an Arcade-style game where players sort luggage on airport carousels. Unfortunately what starts as a fun and frenetic game quickly becomes unmanageable as the game continues to introduce new elements far faster than the player can keep up with them. As a result, while I can still see this appealing to some, I think most will grow frustrated with it too quickly for it to be worth their while.

Grade: C

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