Airport Baggage Simulator

I came into Airport Baggage Simulator expecting maybe two hours of novelty before the repetition killed it. What I got instead was a loop that kept pulling me back for one more belt layout, one more scanner placement, one more attempt to stop the whole terminal from imploding under a wave of overweight luggage. The opening hours are deliberately humble: bags roll in, you pick them up, scan green or red on a hand-held device, and shove them onto the correct output belt. It feels almost too simple. Then the Substance Sniffer license unlocks, then the weight-check station, then the launcher module that physically yeets suitcases across the room onto the next belt, and suddenly you are staring at a tangle of conveyor lines wondering why gate 3 keeps getting bags meant for gate 7. The core design arc will be immediately legible to anyone who has played a factory builder: manual grind first, incremental automation second, ruthless optimization third. You buy equipment through an in-game tablet, upgrade your delivery NPC Horst, unlock new baggage types that bring higher income but also new routing complexity, and eventually clear space in the warehouse by installing auto-storage modules that load baggage carts without you touching a single suitcase. The first-person perspective is an interesting choice for this genre. It keeps you physically invested in the space in a way a top-down view would not, and the launcher module is genuinely satisfying to watch fire bags across the room. The decor progression system is more controversial: early on you are forced to place furniture and plants to hit level thresholds before unlocking gameplay upgrades, which feels like artificial gating and is probably the single most common complaint in community forums right now. From a systems-depth standpoint, this is a small game with honest ambitions. The warehouse has one input, which hard-caps your throughput ceiling earlier than automation fans will want, and the space constraints mean you cannot keep scaling parallel lines the way you can in deeper factory titles like Parcel Simulator. Some players coming from that game will find the automation chain logic less flexible, specifically because late-game checks for weapons and weight force manual breaks in what should be a clean automated flow. Those are real design limitations, not just early-access roughness, and the developer is clearly aware the community is vocal about them. Patch cadence has been active since launch, with tweaks to baggage cart snap zones, new quick-stow settings, and auto-storage upgrades already shipped inside the first weeks. Who should actually buy this? If you want a 200-hour Factorio-scale automation sandbox, this is not it. If you want a focused, unpretentious session game that builds genuine satisfaction out of a narrow premise, and if the idea of watching a Substance Sniffer catch a contraband suitcase while your belt layout hums along mistake-free sounds rewarding, then Three River Games has done the hard thing: made the mundane feel like a proper puzzle. The terminal-progression structure, with promotions unlocking new airports under different operating conditions, gives the mid-game a clear direction that keeps the hours moving. Early Steam sentiment sits solidly positive, which, given how unforgiving logistics-game audiences tend to be, says something real about the moment-to-moment feel. Just go in knowing the ceiling is lower than you might wish, and plan your first belt layout before you start throwing equipment down.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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