Aircraft used: LVFR 320 and AT7
Live weather: on
DETAIL
A bit of a mixed bag. There are things to like, and things to dislike. The jetways are nicely done and are a snug fit for the A320. The main terminal looks good, rather than fantastic. Its interior, however, is very basic by today’s standards, and looks somewhat cartoonish. Just a few seats and bins, and one shop that’s a 2D texture overlay. The textures are pretty high-res, though. Landside looks fine, with custom, low-res car models and some custom trees (some of which are unique to this scenery but look quite garish in comparison to the rest of the environment). No people anywhere, unfortunately. They have modelled some roadways, which I always think looks much better than the defaults simply left in.
The Mainlandair hangar looks decent and has a modelled interior. In a field opposite are tons and tons of static cows, which look great, even close up. The apron features plenty of nice, custom ground clutter and the ground textures are very good. The perimeter fences look great, consisting in parts of wooden panels that presumably reflect the real-world place. We also get a terraformed runway, and drainage ditches on the airfield (though they could be default?).
Unfortunately the area to the southwest of the terminal, where the fire station is, looks pretty horrendous. That cartoonish feel returns, with the buildings lacking any realistic detail. They look like they’ve been ported from a much earlier version of MSFS! The only saving grace is that the fire trucks are custom and done in decent resolution.
Finally, the night lighting looks good, although the landside part of the terminal is perhaps a little on the bright side. Plus point for there being no Asobo ‘globes’ floating around!
PERFORMANCE
This is where things begin to go wrong. Whenever I have used this airport, it’s black-screened, pretty early on. Those black screens typically result in a CTD if you nosy around too much — which is unusual post-SU13. This could of course be forgiven if we were talking about a reasonably sized airport but NZDN is tiny, with just two stands equipped with jetways. Given its size, the performance is bad. Not absolutely terrible as you can operate flights successfully if you’re conservative with the drone and exterior views, but well below what I’d expect from a small airport with only a moderate amount of detail.
VERDICT
All the deficiencies are perhaps inadvertently reflected in the price, which is just under £6 in the UK. At that price point it’s worth a go if you have to have NZDN, because its either local to you or you simply need to complete your New Zealand airport collection. But any more than the £5.79 I paid and I’d be questioning its value. It’d be a much better airport if it didn’t suffer some needless and, frankly, hard-to-understand performance issues.
They are about to drop another NZ airport: Palmerston North. From the promo images this actually looks a little better, and if it’s a similar price I will no doubt add it to my collection — more out of necessity, though, than an true admiration of Xwind’s work.
IMAGES
The jetway connects well to the 320 and, to give credit where it’s due, the steps don’t sink into the ground like they do at the majority of airports.
The terminal looks nice, if not a little clean. Ground clutter is plentiful and looks great.
The tower looks a bit ‘sterile’, almost as though it’s been ported from an earlier version of MSFS…
…and the fire station looks even worse!
Overview of the terminal from landside. It definitely looks more bland than it does from airside.
The terminal interior is extremely basic and follows the same ‘sterile’ pattern as a lot of the modelling.
These hay bales look fantastic! It’s a shame they didn’t put as much effort in in more important places…
We got cows! Nice to see but, again, could have done with this level of detail elsewhere.
Thankfully the night lighting is pretty decent.
Good airside ground texturing.
A small anomaly I spotted. These floaty things look like they belong in the ATC tower.
