For The Birds: Airborne Empire
Take to the skies in this laid-back city building adventure.
‣ Airborne Empire
From: The Wandering Band LLC, Stray Fawn Publishing
Platforms: PC
Release: Q4 2024
Steam Page • Demo Video • Developer Site
Enjoy the journey, grow your city, explore the world, and shoot some pirates.
Fly your growing city across a picturesque world dotted with green forests, azure lakes, patchwork field, and quaint medieval cities sporting giant windmills. Send aeroplanes to harvest resources that help fuel your engines, feed your citizens, and build more structures. Because if you don't, those sky pirates will eventually arrive, and then we'll all be in a lot of trouble!
Well, a little bit of trouble.
This is more or less the central premise of Airborne Empire, a spiritual sequel to the indie hit Airborne Kingdom. You run a floating city, expanding it with pathways and buildings as you travel across the open world, gather resources, contact cities and settlements, and fight enemies in the sky and on the ground.
Yet despite all the pirates and combat, Airborne Empire is surprisingly relaxing. The bad guys are not particularly aggressive. They escalate their efforts as you progress, but you have time to gather resources, conduct research, and add defences to your flying town.
Nor is this an intense micro-management game. At first, I played carefully, ensuring the necessary resources were within reach of my harvesting aircraft. But it wasn't long before I had enough harvesters and resource reserves to keep moving, selectively picking what I need along the way.
The surface world is lush with resources, letting you zig-zag across the landscape to grab what you need. Moving your city is very simple—click on the ground, and the city starts to fly there. Along the way, you encounter settlements, cities, ruins, and many surprises.
It's normal to spot something in the distance and decide to go investigate. Cities have special areas such as academies for extra tech and markets to buy and sell goods for cash. They can also provide fun missions and introduce you to the game's colourful characters. Find ruins and unique sites that might hide blueprints, cash, or quests.
Workers are the main limit to what you can do. You need them for harvesting, building, and running certain buildings. You can hire new workers at taverns located in the towns and cities. They will automatically fill roles in the buildings, and any spare workers will immediately rush to construct any build orders you give. You can assign the remainder to harvest resources on the ground.
Exploration is one major facet of Airborne Empire. Building your city is the other. You discover new building types through research and as rewards for completing missions. The game has a delightful art style, including fun bird-like characters that are happy to have the assistance of your flying settlement. Zoom into your city, and you can also see them scampering about on the floating platforms.
They are constantly rushing to do work, such as build your next project. You lay out paths, add fans to balance and expand the city, and erect more structures. The demo showcases several buildings such as hangars, warehouses, housing, research academies, iron smelters, and cotton weavers. You also add clinics to keep your workers healthy and lights to ensure they don't fall off. And don’t forget defences and other weapons: the combat is not very difficult, but it requires some preparedness and focus.
📽 Demo Snapshot: A breathtaking moment
Airborne Empire makes several big upgrades over its predecessor. It has a larger world, character quests, and combat. Yet, this is a surprisingly zen game. At one stage, I cranked the game speed up to maximum and forgot to slow it down. Eventually, that's just how I preferred to play the demo.
The slower gameplay pace might turn some people off. Airborne Empire is very laid-back for a combat game, and even for a city builder. It didn't feel very challenging, yet that's not the point. This is more about enjoying the journey, watching your city grow, and taking in the world with its simple yet rich scenery, framed by stunning day/night transitions.
If you yearn to build floating cities, explore a large open world at leisure, make friends and shooting down pirates, get ready to reach for the horison.
Airborne Empire launches in Q4 2024 on Steam.
Explore The Game with Youtube Chapters:
📽 00:52 Welcome to your flying city
📽 04:45 Let's build some stuff
📽 10:17 Moving on and harvesting
📽 35:26 From day to night
📽 42:26 Researching
📽 55:45 Pirate attack!
📽 01:15:35 A few quests
📽 01:22:23 Visiting a city
📽 01:44:33 Hiring workers
📽 01:53:10 Destroy that blockade!
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I loved the relaxed feeling of Airborne Kingdom but was afraid that there wouldn't be much of a change from that game to this one. I still feel a bit on the fence about it -- with a name like Empire, it would've been cool to be able to run a couple of flying cities that interacted with each other...or have your city interact with other flying cities (and maybe frankenstein them together into a megalopolis???).