But you’ll also find towns to expand your population, ruins that provide relics to trade for tech, secrets that allow you access to powerful wonders, and even workshops that give you new color customization options for your city. Exploring the map is hugely important, since that’s how you’ll find the kingdoms you need to unite. I think this might be my favorite aspect of Airborne Kingdom, how smartly all of its systems are interconnected. You’ll need to research all your new toys for your town, after buying the tech from the old kingdoms using relics found in ruins dotted around the map. The mood of your city determines how easy it is to recruit new folks, and you can research all kinds of buildings that mix and match satisfaction of different needs, like tea houses and spirit healers. Your population will have new demands as it grows as well (as new citizens can be recruited from terrestrial towns), including lit roads, sources of faith, health care, and more. Your options for balancing tilt are wide open, too, because you can try to build things symmetrically, or you can cluster all your thrusters at one end and all your buildings on the other like some kind of mortal see-saw, or you can try all sorts of other configurations. Not only do you need to generate enough lift to stay airborne, you need to balance it out so your citizens aren’t living their lives at a permanent Dutch angle. Some are renewable, some aren’t, but sourcing all of them will factor heavily into where you city goes and how it gets there.Īnother key concern that really spices up the building is the tilt of your city.

Beyond that, you’ll need an assortment of other resources like wood, clay, and quartz to build your burg out. Your chief concerns are food, water, and coal, and while you get options to use or process them more efficiently, you’ll always need to be replenishing your supply from the surface. But given the unique nature of the game, you also have to place hangars for gatherers to launch expeditions from, mechanisms like wings and turbines to keep the city afloat, and different engines to help move the city across the world. From there, you build paths, housing, workshops, and warehouses as you would with most resource-based builders. Starting out, you have only the main building of your flying city. Setting aside the absolutely fantastical optimism of a technologically-advanced society that DIDN’T use their powers for conquest, this is a marvelous premise for a game and fits extremely well with the serene atmosphere of the gameplay. Only then, will you learn of the fate that befell those who traveled the skies before you. Striking out from the arid deserts, you must grow your aerial burg, locate the twelve scattered kingdoms, and bring them together in some semblance of the peace and prosperity they enjoyed so long ago. The original airborne kingdom left behind plans for a new flying city, and you are to command this reborn hope for the world.

The golden age of the world ended, but now you have the chance to bring it all back. In the intervening years, kingdoms fell upon hard times, and retreated into isolationism. Their efforts brought peace and prosperity to all, until they vanished. Long ago, a legendary kingdom in the sky traveled the world, imparting knowledge and aid to the many kingdoms of the land. That’s what you want from the best building sims, that feeling that you cannot let go of the experience, and that is absolutely what is present here. I had to have more, had to build out a new flying city, and unite the world all over again. Six hours in this game’s serene, storybook kingdoms simply wasn’t enough for me. I know that’s a normal thing for a lot of people, but I’m very much a one-and-done gamer usually when I beat a game, I’m fully satisfied to move on to something new. When I finished the campaign in Airborne Kingdom, I did something that I never do.

Review airborne kingdom