Airborne Kingdom (PC)
Airborne Kingdom is a city-building adventure, and the word “adventure” isn’t just a bit of flowery language here. While there is definitely a good deal of importance in building up and managing parts of a city, Airborne Kingdom’s gameplay cycle feels like it hinges more on your interactions with the world below your flying settlement. In fact, while its meditative pace and ideas like a research tree make it feel like it can’t be divorced from its city builder classification, it feels more accurate to say the game is first and foremost about exploration, your civilization in the skies a rather advanced tool that needs maintenance to continue to serve its role.
Airborne Kingdom takes place in a world that has been abandoned by the previous civilization in the skies. Once, a city that sailed with wings and propellers through the air served as a unifying ally of cultures across the world. Facilitating trade and sharing advanced knowledge, when it suddenly disappeared, the cities down on the ground lost their connecting point, growing isolated and struggling as they lost the benefits of a globalized world. However, you have rediscovered the means to make a flying city, the player tasked with setting out to restore a world of prosperity by making contact with the various cultures who in turn hold their own beneficial ideas and resources to help your city grow in size and complexity. There is a creative mode where you can more freely build a city without this narrative framing, but Airborne Kingdom’s main mode lays out these clear goals to shoot for, the goal being to utilize your unique technology to find all 12 major settlements so you all can create a world of mutual benefit once more.
When constructing a city that travels through the sky, there are certainly unique considerations compared to a terrestrial settlement. Each new piece added to your city must be constructed from raw materials that you’ll need to collect as you fly over the lands below, the player able to send out small gatherer planes to scoop up things like wood and clay but also resources needed for survival like food, water, and coal to power the city’s engines. Beyond a central structure everything else is meant to emanate out from, this is a city that can be held aloft just as much with wings and balloons as it can rotors and propellers, but the strength of these can influence a small but interesting consideration in how you lay out your town. Certain buildings and structures can heavily impact the weight balance of your flying kingdom, tilting likely to lead to dissatisfaction among your citizens. However, Airborne Kingdom also seems to be a rather forgiving game, as you can carry on for a bit even without necessities like water and food so a little tilt won’t lead to an uprising or anything extreme.
When your kingdom is first taking shape, there aren’t too many buildings to worry about. Storage for resources and homes for residents are a reasonable starting point, and later down the line you can discover or research new structures to build to aid your town. Academies allow you to do more research which not only adds new development options to your flying city but also can increase pre-existing structures’ efficiency or benefits, and eventually you’ll want to place things like greenery and shrines around your city to keep your populace content. There isn’t much room for frivolous additions though, the beautiful Islamic architectural design mostly applied to the practical buildings that are a bit less varied than you might expect. Over time, different regions of the world will let you gather new resources like iron ore and cotton so you need refineries to make them into more useful goods, but these buildings are straightforward in that they convert one resource and that’s about it. You need to dedicate workers to every structure you add and oddly enough you can’t remove them from designated tasks save things like farms, but there isn’t too wide a range of vital buildings to build and it’s fairly likely you’ll be doubling up on the same few repeatedly just for increased production.
This is one reason why Airborne Kingdom can feel a little less like a city-builder at times. You’ll want to build enough housing for residents and then construct a building or two that provides a key resource, but there are stretches of the game where you might not even touch your city’s layout since the people aren’t very demanding and there’s not always too much worth doing. There are convenient features like being able to move anything you’ve placed without cost if you want to do some reshaping, but you won’t often find a reason to manage your city closely. The people often get along fine and even their happiness is cheaply bought with some smartly placed Faith buildings, but this is where the adventuring aspect comes in. You’re not likely meant to fuss over the minutiae of managing a city because its purpose is to facilitate the traveling around the world that is key to completing the story.
At first you’ll find the ground below mostly a place to send out your gathering teams to scoop up whatever you might need. There is no combat in Airborne Kingdom and there’s very little peril, perhaps the most dangerous times being when you head to certain regions of the map where resources like coal or food are incredibly scarce. Instead, once you’ve got enough goods to be self-sufficient, your work ends up fairly goal-oriented as reconnecting the civilizations of the world isn’t as simple as dropping by for a visit. Some welcome the airborne kingdom due to old prophecies, others hardly have the time for a city they see as needlessly extravagant or not worth their time. You must ingratiate yourself with each settlement you encounter, something that will usually involve heading out to explore the nearby area. Ruins exist that you can search for the gems needed to buy new technological blueprints from cities, and towns can be solicited for people interested in living up in the sky as a new citizen. There are even a few rare finds in the world that can lead to creating incredible wonders that can make your easy city management even easier.
However, the goals the settlements give you to earn their favor are often not that ambitious in design. Some simply request a certain resource which is rarely an issue, others might require you to poke around nearby ruins in search of people or a special object but “exploring” such places just means sending a plane down to trigger an information screen to pop up. There is some flowery writing to make things feel more meaningful when exploring or interacting with cities and the world below does have something interesting locations like a flooded part of the world, but the tasks given to you to curry favor with the settlements don’t force you too outside the box compared to things you’re already doing. The only reason you might not have enough of a resource is to save on storage and the only reason you might not find an important ruin is because you haven’t reached it yet, but they can at least be dressed up a bit like when you need to go investigate a contaminated water supply which means any water resources in the area are useless until you do so. These goals do point you in a good direction for your next bit of work at least and the adventure feels like it goes along at a fine pace because it’s easy to quickly head off and learn what needs to be done next. It can feel like things remain rather unambitious though. There is a lovely soundtrack that fits the game’s relaxed pace and there’s room for some creative customization as you can find new color paints and metals out in the world as well, but the lack of complicated play can mean the gradual meditative trip across the skies really isn’t mustering up anything too compelling. You remain active and working, but there aren’t too many deep decisions to make or ideas to figure out.
THE VERDICT: Airborne Kingdom is a breezy city builder that plays more like an adventure through the sky than a settlement manager. City management is simple and the population easy to please, most your attention focused instead on scooping up resources as you fly along so you can figure out what the nearest cities need to cement their cultural ties to your traveling kingdom. The tasks given to your by those settlements aren’t often demanding or complex, but they do point you in a decent enough direction that you can spend much of the game contentedly doing a mix of gathering and ruin searching before a small change like new citizens or a new material ask you to do a touch of building. It’s not exactly a riveting process, but exploring the game’s world and the light maintenance needed to keep your city serviceable means it works as an interesting twist on the city builder format.
And so, I give Airborne Kingdom for PC…
An OKAY rating. Airborne Kingdom has the makings of a more involved city-builder but it never gets past its early stages of development. The citizens have needs but they aren’t complex enough, it a bit too easy to keep your city content and functional. Things like clinics are introduced late in the game but health doesn’t even seem too much of a necessity, but introducing potential disruptions could have drawn your attention back to your kingdom’s construction beyond the occasional moments when you need some new refinery or a new row of housing. The true answer to making things more interesting might actually lie with the game’s more adventure oriented elements. Airborne Kingdom doesn’t feel like it wants its city building to be demanding or draw too much attention from sailing across the land, so the cities should have drummed up more interesting or varied requests to compensate. For example, you come across a settlement where smithing is the main focus, but rather than needing anything too interesting to appeal to this land where manufacturing is key, you just give them coal because they mined too much of it in the nearby area. Instead, perhaps the airborne kingdom would have to prove it values their craft, the player needing to train up workers to produce impressive masterworks that you’d in turn need to research and develop. Perhaps you could impress them by using rare metals, or maybe your citizens could be cultivated into artisans by taking on riskier work that could potentially fail. Considering the importance of making alliances around the world, having dedicated buildings in your settlement that mostly work towards such goals would be an easy way to expand the variety in places you need to build, and they could always provide some extra resources after like those hypothetical metallurgists could maybe help you build higher quality structures after their training.
Airborne Kingdom isn’t lacking in things to do as is, but they are pretty straightforward despite the world being spaced out well to ensure the gameplay loop doesn’t get overly dull. There are interesting places to discover even if your interactions with them are limited and keeping your resources topped off fills the time spent traveling through plainer places. However, some more management elements or long term goals to shoot for could have been more satisfying ways to spend the flight time. Airborne Kingdom does wisely let you speed the game up quite a bit to avoid it absolutely dragging, but even at max speed it can sometimes feel a bit too leisurely, the enjoyment you get here more from mild maintenance and sightseeing than really developing an exceptional Airborne Kingdom or global society.