Airport Scanner for iOS

When it comes to iOS games, we tend to prefer the simple ones that require strategy, but with simple gameplay. After a quick read-through of Airport Scanner's description, we jumped at the chance to review it because of its simple premise: As a TSA officer, you have to watch an X-ray scanner to identify harmful items and prevent them from being taken onto the plane. But a cluttered design and barrage of pop-up tips and lessons made the game more annoying than fun to play.

Airport Scanner doesn't have any kind of Help feature, but, thankfully, the game is straightforward enough that you can quickly figure it out soon after starting. Luggage is passed through the X-ray scanner where you can view its contents. Tap the luggage if you see a harmful item, which really isn't that challenging; it was pretty easy to pick out the gun and ax silhouettes. A tip popped up that told us we could scroll the conveyor belt to quicken the pace of the luggage, which was helpful. But then tip after tip kept popping up, so much so that we had to stop the game out of frustration. As far as the game's design, there's a lot going on in a small space. The scanner resides in the bottom half of your screen, while the scoreboard, flight number, and lines of passengers and other TSA officers are all squeezed in at top. After successfully completing one level, we were taken to a bonus game that at first looked like an ad page and we weren't sure whether to click on it or not.

Despite Airport Scanner's simple premise, we just couldn't get past the clutter and can't recommend it.

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Bug fixes and minor improvements.