Damn you Pocket Planes! Why must you be addicting?

The next addicting, alliterative game from NimbleBit has appeared, and it is called Pocket Planes. They are tiny planes that fit in your pocket, and you cannot help but be captivated by them.

If you have spent any time with NimbleBit’s last hit Tiny Tower, then the idea behind Pocket Planes will be pretty familiar: small tasks are broken up over many areas (or in this game planes) and your job is to keep everything running smoothly to collect more and more money. In Tiny Tower, your money was used to build more floors. In Pocket Planes, you are trying to connect the world via the magic of flight, and you purchase airports and planes with your hard earned cash.

The game starts out with a brief tutorial and then lets you select a portion of the world to start your airline business. I happened to choose Oceana because Australia rules, and the game gave me four small planes that could travel among Brisbane, Melbourne, and a couple other smaller cities. When a plane is at an airport, you look to see what kinds of jobs are available there, fill up your plane, and tell it to go to the destination city needed by the job. Basically only two kinds of jobs exist: passenger travel and cargo transportation, and your planes can only hold so much of each (or one or the other). It’s up to you to collect enough money to buy more planes and expand your airline empire.

And that’s basically it in a nutshell, but leaving it at that description would be doing the game a disservice. There is quite a bit of customization you can do to your planes and pilots, and each plane and airport can be upgraded in multiple ways to allow for faster travel (in planes) or more jobs (in airports). The BitBook from Tiny Tower returns, allowing you to see the thoughts of the Bitizens that are flying on your airline. There are achievements and rankings in Game Center, stats for your airline, and even a Flight Crew feature that allows you to “team up” with friends to compete for in-game Bux via the amount of jobs you collectively accomplish.

Pocket Planes uses the same aesthetic from Tiny Tower in that everything in the game is angular and pixelated to the max, but this only adds to the charm of the game. Bitezens are adorable. You can’t fight it.

The best part about all of this is that the game is free! The bad news is that it is for iOS only right now, but who doesn’t have an iPhone at this point? Weirdos, that’s who.

RELATED: ios itunes nimblebit pocket planes tiny tower