Here at eXplorminate, where we are dedicated to the 4X, strategy, tactics, and (now apparently) city-building game genres, I am now dubbing this time the “Winter of City Builders”. Considering that my last review was for Per Aspera, another city (ahem *colony*) builder, Airborne Kingdom, developed and published by The Wandering Band, is a continuation of my fascination and current enjoyment with unconventional city builders.
Surprisingly, this review took a bit longer to write as I could not pull myself away from playing the game. It has engaged me unlike other city builders in recent memory, because of how its exquisite blend of mechanics come together so well in such a beautiful package. From the Arabian Nights/Steampunk-themed mashup theme (this is an aesthetic I adore and would love to see more of), to the beautiful mosaic board game-like world below, this lovely little gem found a way to pull me in hard and only ever so slightly loosen its grip.
Without further ado, lets fly off in our Airborne Kingdom!
Soaring to New Heights
As you may be able to tell from the name, Airborne Kingdom starts you off in a flying city – well, not so much of a city at the start, you must build your way up there. In the game’s narrative, you start as a group of people looking to fulfill a prophecy to bring back an old airborne kingdom that united the cities on the ground, through a Grand Council established in this flying city. It is quite a meager start, with just a town center that has an impressive coal-powered propeller system keeping it afloat. To survive, resources must be collected from the world below, and your city can propel itself throughout the world to find resources. As it collects resources, your city grows and can produce more and different types of goods, as well as providing services to your workers to keep them happy or various propulsion systems to keep your city in the sky.
Airborne Kingdom essentially plays like a resource management game, in the same vein as many survival city builders. The basic starting resources you need are food, water, coal, and lumber; the first two sustain your workforce, lumber is the main resource for construction, and coal keeps the lights on (and your city in the air!). Resource points are finite yet regenerate, allowing the player to jump around to different parts of the map, fill up, then circle back around again. They regenerate much slower than can be collected however, so to maintain your city it is important to keep moving and looking for different resource points. In addition, building placement matters greatly. Since this is a city floating in the sky, it is probably a good idea that your city-ship stays upright, unless your workers want to live and work on a sharp angle (or even worse slide off!). Having enough lift for your city, from noisy vertical rotors that no one wants to live by to wings and balloons that quietly keep you aloft, is necessary to keep the city growing and in the air. So-called “lift” is an important resource, however in my playthrough I unlocked powerful vertical rotors early that made lift an afterthought (at the cost of workers and rapidly using my coal reserves!).
Resources are not the only points of interest on the map though. In my travels I found small settlements, various ruins, and secrets scattered throughout the world. Among the most notable landmarks are the large cities that comprise the land-based kingdoms in the game. These cities drive the main narrative of Airborne Kingdom in seeking to reunite the former alliance of city-states. To ally with these cities, you must perform quests for them to earn their trust and eventually build them a sky port. The sky port then signifies your alliance and gets you closer to completing the Grand Council. Large cities are also the only way to discover new techs, provided you have enough relics to trade for them.
And yes, you heard that right! There is a tech tree in the game. As you can see, there are six different research trees that correspond to the types of buildings that can be built in your city. There is nothing groundbreaking with the research, with which I had no issue; it served its purpose of gradually giving the player new buildings to construct without unlocking four to five buildings at once that needed to be built all at the same time. New buildings require refined or processed resources including adobe, iron, glass, and linen; the appropriate factories need to be built, and base resources collected and processed to expand your city. In addition, more technologies can be researched to improve efficiency or reduce resource costs. These are unlocked once you obtain new buildings, which means there is no need to trawl the land looking for research that boosts water production by 25%.
The only major pain I had with research is that switching the tech you are researching means losing any progress you have on the current tech. In a few instances, I found myself switching techs to address immediate resource needs, like boosting the amount of comfort generated by a particular building. This meant that if I had to switch a tech, I lost all of the progress on it – and some of the later techs take a few in-game days to research. I find that much too harsh of a penalty, especially coming from a 4X background where such a penalty is mostly unheard of. If I had to guess, the penalty was added because the research tree is much smaller in this game.
I’m Sailing Flying Away
Cities drive the story of the game. It is not narrative like Per Aspera, so do not expect much in the way of voice acting; in fact, there is no spoken dialogue, it is entirely delivered through text. As cities join your alliance, a tapestry grows that shows the different cities you have allied with. There are three regions to visit, each containing four large cities among the various points of interest. The regions vary in the terrain and the types of available resources. The player can travel the whole map at the start, but it may be wise to plan your travels accordingly. The first zone is largely composed of plains with plateaus and plentiful basic resource points, making it a good place to begin growing and expanding your city. Another region is set among an ocean with various islands, and introduces more resources for the players, and the last zone being a mountainous region that is difficult to find resources such as food in.
The regions were all varied and had interesting challenges, although the sea region was my least favorite. Constantly covered in fog and clouds with no sunlight, it was impossible to see anything. I assume this was to increase that region’s difficulty by making it difficult to find resources, but it was probably the ugliest area in the game. It made it difficult to really enjoy the map visuals, because it blocked the view of the entire land and sea below, pulling me away from the experience. Perhaps having something like intermittent storms that slowed resource gathering and made the clouds thick temporarily would have been more interesting. In any case, this region took away some enjoyment from the game for me unlike the other regions.
I enjoyed this lighter take on a campaign story that is not linear or directed and gives the player greater agency in the story of their kingdom. This also allows for greater replayability, as the entire map besides the starting area is randomized with each playthrough – so the cities’ locations will be different for each run. In addition, the technology that cities offer is also randomized on game start. I think this melding of story and sandbox style gameplay really suits the game, as planning different routes and building types of cities present an interesting challenge, and certainly makes Airborne Kingdoms a game I will revisit in the future.
The Listing Airship
While Airborne Kingdom is a great and well-designed game, there were a few areas in which it faltered. With regards to gameplay mechanics, managing your workers is non-existent, and they function almost exactly like other resources. This means that if I wanted to build a building, I had to make sure I had the requisite number of citizens. While that issue might amount to nothing but a minor annoyance, the issue was that it represented the way workers are used and managed. In these types of resource management games, I prefer more granular control over what my workers produce and being able to shift workers, as necessary. Turning off a building did nothing more than halt the resources that the building consumed, it did not release the workers back into the pool. I found myself in scenarios where I lost workers due to morale, therefore losing my resource gathering workers – this is because the way workers are handled in Airborne Kingdoms, your idle workers fly the planes that collect resources, as you assign them to collect from those resource points. So, once I lost those workers, I found myself unable to collect the resources I needed. Turning off buildings I had did not help; I had to instead destroy them, lose resources to gain workers back, then rebuild them again once I found new recruits. The whole process was quite cumbersome and appears to be as the developers designed. However, I find this mechanic rather unintuitive and hope the developers reconsider their decision.
Speaking of unintuitive mechanics, morale was something that I thought I understood but quickly became unclear when I started losing recruits en masse. Morale slides on a scale based on the overall morale of each of your colonists, ranging from Angry to Jubilant. As the city hits certain population thresholds, it grows bigger from a village to a town and eventual kingdom. At each threshold, recruits begin to ask for more. It starts with lights to keep paths lit (which was a pain, because it is a one tile building that must be built on its own) to various buildings to meet the comfort and faith requirements of the recruits. I never ran into a situation where my recruits morale fell below Mediocre, in the middle of the scale, but I still ended up losing about eight or nine recruits in all. I did not feel as though the game communicated the impact of low morale, and at Mediocre I thought my recruits were not unhappy enough to up and leave, as no one was Upset or Angry. I think this could use more clarification and tweaking.
On the player side however, it is important to be aware of those thresholds, and know that once you pass them your recruits will expect more. The reason I lost workers was because they demanded more comfort buildings, none of which I had researched or was producing the right resources for. While it acts as a speed bump, the issue is that to win, the kingdom must grow to 150 inhabitants, and once recruits leave there is no getting them back. It is important to be mindful of morale, even though the world generally has a fair enough number of recruits that a few losses will not cost you a campaign.
Conclusion
While Airborne Kingdoms did falter in a few areas, it quickly righted itself and was a game I found immensely enjoyable. I appreciated the fact that the developers did not add a ham-fisted combat layer, and instead I found Airborne Kingdom to be a refreshing break from the typical war and combat-focused games I play. I heartily recommend this title, and I will certainly follow along for content updates.
Airborne Kingdom is available on the Epic Games Store for $19.99 USD. If you enjoy our content, please consider supporting the site by entering ‘EXPLORMINATE’ in the Creator Tag box if you decide to pick it up. Thank you!
