Cartel Pilots Wanted makes the cargo, not the flying, the co-op problem

After a wild night in paradise you and your friends wake up on a remote island owned by a cartel. To start your lives again you take to the skies and fly questionable missions for your new employers. Take contracts, stack cargo, deliver it across a vast tropical archipelago.

The interesting choice is that the cargo is physical. Stacking it is a task with its own rules, and once the plane is moving that stack is a passenger with opinions. A flight sim where the aircraft is the only simulated object gives you one problem to solve; a flight sim where the load shifts gives you a problem that changes shape mid-air.

That is what makes it co-operative rather than merely multiplayer. One person can fly a plane alone. One person cannot fly a plane and chase a sliding crate at the same time, which is the whole reason the second, third and fourth players exist.

Money earned goes back into the aircraft, so the loop closes: take a worse contract, survive it badly, buy the thing that would have made it survivable, take a worse one still.

How Overcooked’s kitchens force you to communicate is the design this is built on, moved into the air. Overcooked works because the kitchen is too small, not because the recipes are hard. A cargo hold is the same trick with more consequences, since the thing you are crowding is also the thing keeping you level.

Secrets of game feel and juice matters more than usual here. Cargo that slides convincingly is the difference between a comedy and a chore, and the weight has to read through the controller before it reads through the flight model.

The rise of the systemic game explains why a pitch like this can outlive its missions. If the plane, the load and the weather are all simulated separately, the game generates its own stories and does not need a script to stay interesting on the twentieth run.

Cartel Pilots Wanted is by OldYacht, published by Polden Publishing and Blue Ocean Games, coming to Windows with no date announced. It is filed under Action, Indie and Simulation.

The store page is upfront that this is a job sim before it is a flying game — contracts, cargo, upgrades — which sets the right expectation. The fantasy is being underpaid and over-committed with friends, not being an ace.

If the appeal is a group of people failing at a job with physical objects, Dear Passengers is the closest sibling here: crewing the world’s worst airline, with one of you flying and the rest holding the cabin together.