Airborne Empire Review (PC)

To envision a future built on the axis of aviation and fantastical innovation is a fundamental challenge, and not to mention one of several crucial goals for the development of a sustainable economy. In Airborne Empire, this aspiration of establishing a floating kingdom that orbits its own organic welfare is the only thing that keeps you afloat; it’s the collective desire of the cloud-based citizens to not only keep it from collapsing into chaos, but to ensure that it excels in its natural, albeit highly unorthodox habitat. The one major drawback to laying the groundwork for a floating city, of course, is that it’s prone to toppling — and that’s merely one of the many issues of concern for those destined to pull the strings. And in this case, that’s you. Needless to say, though, that, if you’re able to abide by the laws of aviation, then sky’s the limit.

Airborne Empire, for those who have yet to take the opportunity to build their own floating worlds, is a city-building RPG that centers its entire existence around the basic premise of an airborne metropolis. Like, for example, its predecessor, Airborne Kingdom, yet another of The Wandering Band’s city-building RPGs, the game sees you assuming control over an elevated portion of land—a platform that, with enough resources and mechanical materials, can withstand a dramatic surge in population growth and economic expansion. To put it simply, it’s Airborne Kingdom 2.0, though perhaps with a few additional elements and some nifty upgrades to its core gameplay, to boot.

If you’re still on the fence on whether or not to divulge your ambition to monopolize the skies, then be sure to read on as we delve even deeper into its inner workings. Care to join us? Then let’s take to the skies, folks.

Propelling the Future

Airborne Empire takes the iron roots of its prequel to build a fresh and invigorating city-building experience that, while still conceptually the same as its original blueprint, aims to generate thrice as much content, as well as implement various structural changes to the UI and other keystone pipelines. In a nutshell, the journey sees you, the ruler with a knack for creating floating skylines, taking gradual steps towards the fulfillment of a self-sustaining cloud-centric economy. In short, this essentially means having to transport your elevated world around an enormous open-world map, collecting resources from various settlements, upgrading one of several structures like houses and places of work, fending off pirates and other forceful threats, and of course, learning how to manage the tilt mechanic and keep your kingdom from tilting and accruing penalty points. And if you think all of that sounds like a lot to onboard, then hey — welcome.

The primary objective of the game is to, well, build a city and collect enough materials to expand it into something of an airborne marvel with all of the bells and whistles of an idyllic world. To start out, you have a few basic Quests—find an anchor point above an area of interest, build several homes for your citizens, and begin the long and oftentimes grueling process of obtaining enough natural resources to develop a stockpile for future projects. After that, the sky well and truly becomes the limit; the world broadens its horizon and offers you the chance to explore vast distances, and resources gradually become more valuable, thus allowing you to activate specific nodes on an upgrade board, and upgrade structures to boost your economic potential. That building process isn’t an issue; it’s the threat of either succumbing to pirates or failing to restore balance.

We’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat

As it turns out, Airborne Empire isn’t just a “cozy” city-building game; it’s a tactical RPG, too. And it’s thanks to the game’s numerous threats—pirates, brigades, and other aerial enemies, for example—that you not only have the responsibility of maintaining the city’s evolution and keeping it from falling out of the sky, but also protecting it from harm as countless foes dare to either destroy or ransack your city’s infrastructure and resources. With that, there is a new mechanic that you must address: defenses. In a typical tower defense-like scenario, the game offers you the ability to build turrets, canons, and a multitude of other weapons to tackle enemy attacks — which are an annoyingly frequent occurrence, I’ll admit.

I’d be lying if I said that the combat is fun. To tell the truth, fending off the evil forces that prowl around your city is an absolute nightmare, especially when you’re already struggling to make ends meet and establish your hub’s structural integrity. In some personal cases, for instance, it was more the case of having to spend more time building turrets to counter enemies than actually exploring the world to accrue a certain material or blueprint. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mind being the victim to a mindless onslaught, but the fact that I’d have to devote a second eye to keeping a seemingly endless army at bay was a total pain in the backside, and something that I would’ve been willing to sacrifice for the sake of exceeding in other areas of the game.

One Small Step for Aviation

Airborne Empire is a relatively good-looking game — at least in terms of its city design and landmarks and what have you; the mechanical windmills gleam, as do the robotic doodads and doohickeys of the city’s homes, workplaces, and other structures of interest. As for the world that idles below the clouds, well, that’s another story. Of course, the bulk of the journey itself takes place from atop a plateau of floating platforms, so I’m almost willing to let the lack of polish on the ground slide. Having said that, the world that you endlessly hover over isn’t particularly special; it harbors the occasional cluster of trees, which can be used for foraging resources, a small collection of settlements for collecting other items, and a seemingly desolate plain, which eats up the lion’s share of the open-world map, in general. Not great, but far from imperfect.

Thankfully, there’s plenty of content to shovel through here, which doesn’t come as too much of a surprise, given its relation to yet another jam-packed city-building sandbox. Aside from the inclusion of an open-world setting that’s teeming with locations to visit, resources to plunder, and buildings to erect, the game also features a solid selection of Quests, upgrades, and pathways to explore over the course of a dozen or so hour campaign. Is there enough to make you want to come back after the first round? Maybe, maybe not. For me, it all boils down to whether or not the pirates would frustrate me just as much as they did in the preliminary stages. Man, I really disliked the pirates.

Verdict

There’s a tremendous amount that I genuinely love about Airborne Empire—the fantastical nature of the scenery and its unique design, being two of the main attractions, for sure. But on the other hand, there are one or two things that continue to cloud my judgment—the mindless and tediously ill-timed attacks from the pirates, being the dividing line between my love for the experience and my hatred toward the design itself. Even still, if I’m reading between the lines here, and not to mention taking into account the amount of hours I physically spent finessing the code and developing the community, then it suddenly becomes a no-brainer. True, I disliked a significant portion of the experience, but for some reason, that never quite stopped me from wanting to explore more of the world and learn from my previous mistakes. So, a love-hate relationship, you could say.

To state the obvious, yes, you are far more likely to gel with Airborne Empire if you’re already familiar with city-building games with added combat mechanics. To say that Airborne Empire is a difficult game wouldn’t be entirely accurate, however, if you were planning to pick it up for yourself, then I’d strongly encourage you to be patient with the rules and not fret over the minor inconvenience of having to deal with copious amounts of drawbacks. In other words, if it’s a cozy aviation-centric city-building game that you’re on the market for, then I’d suggest taking flight in an alternate skyline. If it’s a successor to Airborne Kingdom that’s vastly superior than its previous incarnation that you’re hunkering down for, however, then you should feel right at home with this souped-up revival of The Wandering Band’s two-piece series.