This is complicated somewhat by having to, quite literally, balance your settlement. The downside is that these buildings need to be kept separated from housing blocks, or you risk angering the masses.īuilding your city is simple, with structures snapping onto roads. As you hoover up more stuff from the world below you’ll want to construct warehouses for storage and industry in order to attain better quality resources. High above the clouds you’ll need to balance various elements in order to keep your inhabitants happy.

There are also ruins out in the world, which you can plunder for relics and then trade in for building blueprints at the larger settlements. Larger cities take more encouragement to join up, giving out simple quests to complete. In your explorations you’ll also come across other small settlements, who will either supply you with astonished citizens or give you new sets of paint and coloured metal to customise your buildings with. It’s a simple loop – gathering what’s in the area before moving on in the hope you’ll come across more on an as-needed basis. From your hangar, sets of gliders will shoot out to collect the resources, swooping down to mine for minerals, chop wood, gather food and suck oases dry. In order to keep your flying kingdom operational, you’ll need to stock up on resources.Ĭoal to feed the engine’s fires, food and water to keep your citizens working and timber to build with. Your goal is to find other cities, forge alliances and grow your settlement into a great empire. From the starting ruin you’ll venture out and discover islands of interest among the wastes. Unlike most city-builders, your kingdom isn’t tethered to the ground. The themes of the game – rekindling ancient knowledge, and the flourishing of art, culture and science – are also reminiscent of the historical era.Īirborne Kingdom. Your city, lightly coloured, with elegant, tapered arches, domed roofs and cupolas, recalls the architecture from the Islamic Golden Age. The land below your kingdom is laid out on beautiful mosaic tiles, while far off at the edges you can make out the parchment of the universe curling in on itself. Like the story, the world of Airborne Kingdom is a cartographic one – taking place upon a map so large that the scale is essentially 1:1. A sprawling landscape-as-map that recalls one of Jorge Louis Borges’ most famous short stories, ‘ On Exactitude In Science’. A flying city-fortress, you rise from sand-covered ruins, using ancient tech to lift your settlement up into the clouds and propel it onwards.įrom the air you’ll survey a vast territory. Pictures are screenshots from the game, taken by the author.A irborne Kingdom offers a compelling fantasy. Platforms: Epic Games Store, Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox It’s not a bad game by any means, just disappointing. Airborne Kingdom’s 21€ price tag is fair to me, but the game does have such a lack of content that it feels more like an early access game, even though it isn’t. I have very limited play hours so far so maybe something interesting is still coming up, but right now I feel quite uninterested to start the game and find out. The tech tree has a similar problem: let me research something cool and interesting rather than 20% more power to fans or more capacity for warehouses. Exploring around is a bit dull and so is the world in general: It’s mostly desert and even the cities feel rather unlively. Still, I feel like something is missing in the game, something just doesn’t click. At least for me, that’s something fresh and uncommon. Airborne Kingdom draws its aesthetic inspiration from middle eastern building style with minarets and onion style domes. What’s even better: it’s not a steampunk game.

The game is beautiful, it has a good soundtrack and I personally like relaxing building games.

Review airborne kingdom