Airborne Empire is the sequel to Airborne Kingdom, expanding the concept of managing a flying city and introducing new features to enhance the gameplay itself. The game blends resource management, city construction, and combat, creating a good balance between familiar elements and new additions. While it might not feel like a completely new game, Airborne Empire improves upon the original and offers an enjoyable city-building experience. Although I haven’t played the first game, watching videos and gameplay gave me a good sense of what it was like.
The game’s plot is set years after the events of Airborne Kingdom, and your task is to rebuild a flying civilization. You still need to manage basic resources like food, water, housing, and coal, but now you also have to consider the city’s lift, propulsion, health, and tilt as you design it. Every building placement affects your city’s balance, requiring careful planning and a drive for efficiency. I found managing all these elements particularly fun, and I was pleasantly surprised by how large your flying city can become. It’s also great that you can easily redesign the city whenever you want.
The gameplay is simple yet fun: you follow quests, gather resources, complete missions, and develop your kingdom. Exploring the terrain in search of materials and ruins adds variety to the game. You can recruit new citizens, complete side quests, and collect artifacts. There’s also trading, which allows you to earn money and unlock new building blueprints. The game offers a lot, from relaxing resource gathering to exploration outside of the main tasks.
However, the gameplay can start to feel a bit monotonous. The map is often large but mostly empty, with resources being the main incentive for exploration. Although there are unique points of interest, such as cotton farms, guard towers, and temples that you can rebuild, the lack of more significant interaction diminishes their importance. Adding more vibrancy and dynamic elements to the game world would significantly improve the experience. Despite this, all the previously mentioned features still provide that sense of satisfaction from achievement.
The introduction of combat is the biggest improvement to the game. You must defend against sky pirates by constructing cannons, fighter planes, and defensive towers. This adds an exciting layer of tension, requiring you to balance offensive and defensive strategies while simultaneously repairing damage during battles. Nevertheless, I have a serious issue with this mechanic: you cannot fully avoid damage. It’s frustrating that, despite numerous options for attack and defense, a single squadron of basic ships can inflict significant damage.
Overall, the progression in this Early Access version is impressive. The core concept revolves around advancing technology, which allows you to improve your city and attract more residents. The quests are varied, ranging from helping troubled cities to defeating pirate kings. However, the story is rather uninspired, relying mostly on text that often fails to properly engage the player. Additionally, the game becomes quite repetitive; fix this, help there, discover that biome — it simply lacks genuine excitement.
The graphics in Airborne Kingdom are truly beautiful, with rich detail in the flying city and vibrant biomes below. Every city and airship is characterized by a clean, elegant design that perfectly captures the magic of the world among the clouds. Although the cities are beautifully rendered, some ground environments and sky backgrounds can appear repetitive, but this doesn’t significantly detract from the overall experience. Furthermore, the game offers a diverse selection of buildings to manage, from warehouses to clinics and farms, providing numerous interesting options to keep you engaged.
For a game in the Early Access phase, Airborne Empire runs exceptionally well if you have a solid PC. The biggest issue is the occasional slowdown when moving the camera, but there are no major bugs or glitches that affect gameplay. While we expect better optimization as the game develops, it already feels very polished and is a joy to play.
In conclusion, this game is not perfect. One of the main issues is the game’s pacing. Certain tasks take longer than they should, which can be frustrating. For example, producing enough iron and fabric takes a lot of time; even with upgrades, it never seems sufficient. The same goes for researching technologies. Do we really need to wait 48 in-game hours to complete one research? That feels excessive. Still, in most cases, you can amuse yourself by exploring or flying around while the research progresses, so that time isn’t completely wasted.
Another pacing issue is the day and night cycle. Days and nights last quite long, and unfortunately, you can’t adjust this. On the other hand, repairs and building construction happen almost instantly, which raises the question of how advanced this fictional civilization is. The balance between these elements could certainly use further refinement.
The price is also worth mentioning. For an Early Access game, the price is a bit high. However, the game already offers 15 or more hours of gameplay and is quite polished for the current version. As the developers stated on Steam: “We plan to add new building types, new biomes, new events/missions, and expand the game’s world story.” Even in its current state, the game has plenty of content to explore, so you won’t feel shortchanged if you decide to buy it. At the end of the day, you might just find yourself hooked on the game because you won’t be able to resist it.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Interesting city-builder mechanics. | Repetitive exploration. |
| Beautiful graphics and visuals. | The story is not that detailed and deep. |
| Well-designed progression through technology. | High price for Early Access. |
| Interesting combat mechanics. | Problems with game pacing. |
Review copy provided by the publisher
4.0
