Airborne Empire Review

Nowadays, city builders try to push boundaries by offering fun premises and unique takes. Generally, classic grid-like city builders like Caesar or Anno have been experiencing a downturn lately. You will more often find games that take place in a medium that should realistically be foreign to city-builders.

However, more often than not, these city-builders tend to get lost in overambition and perplexing systems that make very little sense in hindsight. Yet, The Wandering Band has done a great job in continuing its ideas with Airborne Empire.

For those who have not played the first game, Airborne Empire is a strategy and open-world city-builder that takes to the skies with its ideas of city-building. You basically build your own city, almost from scratch, hovering in the sky. What's more, you can move around.

In Airborne Empire, you start off with a lone Town Center with the ability to build only one building. This is, of course, a hangar. You build paths around the Town Center, set down your first hangar, and then send your citizens down into the land to gather resources. 

In Airborne Empire, these resources include Water, Food, Coal, Wood, Iron, Cloth, and Glass. You need the first two for your citizens to survive. Coal is used to power your city lights and propulsion, so you need all three to effectively run your city. All the others are either construction or trade-related resources.

Other than this, you will also find ancient relics and coins to be a resource as well. Ancient relics are essentially very rare items waiting to be used. While the coins are tools for you to recruit more people. This can happen in pretty much every town you come across, where you will find prospecting individuals in Taverns. You can also use coins for bartering. To get coins, you must find ancient ruins where you have a chance to get a relic, but most likely, you will get yourself a few coins for your troubles.

That brings us to the resource collection. In the Airborne Empire you collect resources by sending citizens down in planes to get them. You can only send a certain number down there, depending on how many planes you have.

Once you gather enough wood, you'll get onto creating some armor and find yourself with the ability to move around the map. One of the coolest aspects of the game is that you can move the city anywhere around the map, so you can harvest one area's resources and then move on to the others. As you get into the city, you will be tasked with rebuilding academies and other buildings by the owner of the city, and you basically just accept without much hiccup.

Speaking of Academies, in Airborne Empire, Academies are buildings that let you research other buildings or upgrades. These generally take a certain few hours in-game and cost resources. However, the interesting thing is that you'll need to upgrade both existing and new structures once certain research is complete.

In Airborne Empire, all buildings need a path, even though you might see there is no divider. Now, you'll notice that there is a meter called 'lift;' this marker determines how many new buildings you can add and shows the angle of your direction.

In addition to that, building things only on one side will lead to your city tilting; now, you won't lose the game, but your inhabitants will start to get angry, reducing their morale. Another measure in the game is lights, which are lights that allow your people to see what's happening at night. This is also one of those necessities, meaning that having a lack of lighting will lead to accidents and such. Accidents mean you have injured citizens, and so you'll need buildings to take care of them.

The gameplay loop in Airborne Empire pretty much revolves around that as you explore the region, expand your city, and occasionally encounter sky pirates whom you either try to avoid or engage. You can't just have a lumbering city since that's an easy ticket to getting overwhelmed by these sky pirates. Instead, you need fans and propellers to move and keep yourself propped up.

You also need to build various defensive structures like walls and defensive arrays. As you get larger, you get harder to defend, but enemies also have a tough time fighting through your city. Airborne Empire has quite a few buildings to create and do things with; however, for the most part, you will rely on your defenses. When it comes to retaliation, you can also go around looting sky pirate bases.

Airborne Empire is still much like its previous incarnation, with the very simple gameplay loop and survival element that remains the mainstay of the game. The game does a pretty good job weaving the exploration and open-world aspect as you hunt for resources, newer towns for fresh recruits, and look for quests that'll pass the small story of the game.

Of course, combat remains the other big addition. It does a great job of filling the void of time when you are exploring or waiting for techs to be researched. The combat itself is also pretty simple, all the while being dynamic and fun.

There are many wonderful features present. Quality-of-life things such as the ability to see through clouds when the cursor nears them make it obvious that the developers paid attention to what they were doing. The ability to dock your city and rebuild it from scratch while paused also provides a very smart way of resetting the city without resetting progress, all the while giving an immersive way to change things up.

The UI also looks great, although it feels slightly smaller and cluttered, thanks to all the crammed information. The central piece, though, does a good job of selling the information while being pretty. Other than that, Airborne Empire looks absolutely stunning, with incredible visuals that might just make some beefy computers uneasy. 

The game probably has some issues with optimization, as it drops in frames a lot of the time. But other than that, there are no bugs to be seen. There are also no real flaws in the game mechanics themselves, somehow achieving near-perfection on Day 1. This also makes one wonder what's left to do since even at the Early Access release, the game looks like there's very little to be added or left to be completed.

The game's lore is pretty interesting and downright hilarious, if a little short. All the dialogues are funny as well. However, things remain a bit too short now. Hopefully, there will be more story elements later down the line.

Despite having comparatively smaller lore, the game is big, with many areas to explore, a large map with many different biomes, and many quests to complete. The music is also wonderful, giving you just the right tunes with a light beat filled with horns and strings that give all the right vibes of the cozy experience. 

The game is also surprisingly hard and definitely doesn't look the part. What appears to be a cozy and small game suddenly takes a turn for high-intensity and high-action fun that will make you question everything you did. Overall, the city-building and management aspects can also be surprisingly hard with the various resources and production chains you have to manage, as well as the need for a bunch of resources.

Now, there are some things that feel the need to be stated. As previously stated, the sequel doesn't do too much in terms of additions. This might be off-putting for many, but sometimes, games just need to be perfected in the sequel, not reinvented. The game also has issues with pricing that do feel the need to be stated.

Airborne Empire remains somewhat laggy at times, and the optimization seems off. Even with a very industrious PC, you might just struggle to run it. Sudden drops in FPS also contribute to this, making the game sometimes a slog to play.

Overall, Airborne Empire is a great game that strives to do better than its previous iteration. It doesn't change too much as a sequel but remains a wonderful game for genre veterans and newcomers alike. The game has a very interesting take on the City Builder RTS genre and does a brilliant job executing it. Furthermore, it does an even better job weaving the combat elements without overwhelming you with all its mechanics. One can only wonder what remains until the full release, but until then, it is still more than worth it.