Airborne Empire

The game is okay. But compared to the Airborne Kingdom, I can't give a positive review - here is why: - the combat is repetitive and annoying. I wasn't sure about the addition of combat compared to game 1, where resource management was the main focus, especially in the high north (lacking completely here). But after 23h of playing it, it becomes tedious and boring. The final battle (no spoilers) was a bit more challenging, but not in a necessarily exciting way. - the characters and story feel childish. This makes the world unbelievable. You are on a world dominated by violent pirates that plunder and enslave the population, yet the characters you meet and the quests you follow range from benign to funny and light-hearted. This is jarring in contrast to the battles, which are the main new feature of the game. [h2]- the art direction: THIS IS THE BIGGEST ISSUE[/h2] Airborne Kingdom was ethereal, its impersonality was its main trait. It delighted in anonymous mystery. Are you flying on a map or in a real place? It evoked feelings of Borges' [i]'On Exactitude in Science'[/i]. It was dreamlike, playing with its own buoyancy in the double sense: as a gameplay mechanic and as an art style. Airborne Empire isn't ugly, but compared to the all-encompassing mosaic of patterns that stunned in the first instalment it feels cartoonish and superficial, dumbed down. Same goes for the building colours, where are my metallic roofs? I don't want snow men on my buildings... I want coherent immersion. Good aspects: - the birds are cute - great soundtrack

Actually, Airborne Empire is kind of "meh." It's not exactly bad, so I can't bring myself to give it a thumbs down, but it's not great. Like its predecessor Airborne Kingdom, it's a simplistic city builder where the gimmick is your city flies and moves around the map. If you've played Airborne Kingdom, this game adds combat, and it's a lot longer, but it's otherwise pretty similar. Oh, and everyone's a bird this time around. City management is even more rudimentary than Airborne Kingdom. There's very little in terms of layout concerns until the very late game, when you get Artifacts in the late game which give area of effect bonuses around them. Once you do get those Artifacts, you want to cluster all your weapons around the weapon-enhancing Artifacts, cluster your production around the production-enhancing Artifacts, and put fuel-efficiency Artifacts near your lift and propulsion systems. The economy is very simple. You're constantly scavenging food, water, and coal, which are plentiful enough that keeping topped up is easy. You're also collecting wood, ore, plants, and quartz, and converting those into iron, cloth, and glass. Again, all the materials are readily available pretty much everywhere, so it's easy to scavenge what you need. The only exception is quartz which isn't available in the starting area. Aside from running around looting resources, recruiting crew, and adding on to your flying city, you're doing fairly mindless fetch quests for the various ground based cities. Some of these are really annoying because they devolve into pixel hunts. You're searching a large target area for a tiny target. The main challenge is figuring out which hard to make out block is your goal. Combat's simple and pretty easy. There are attack aircraft, blimps, and ground defenses. You counter those with anti-aircraft towers, attack aircraft of your own, and air-to-ground cannons. The main challenge is in the early game, setting up a strong enough net of anti-air towers to take down planes coming in from any direction. In the early game you can take a fair amount of damage before your air defenses take the planes down. There are some obvious gaps in game balance. You eventually unlock a wide variety of buildings, but some are simply never worth constructing, because they're inferior in some way to buildings you unlock earlier. Your main limitation is always population, so lift and propulsion buildings which use muscle power but are less efficient than the fans and propellers which use coal are never worth building. There's always plenty of coal around. It's not terrible, but it's also pretty shallow. The endgame was very dull because I'd built enough farms, water condensers, and charcoal burners that I didn't need to worry about any upkeep except wood, and I had combat buildings that could easily handle any threat the pirates threw at me.

Received this game for free, and so I do want to say that there's a lot that I like about it. It is aesthetically very pleasing. The birds are very cute and the dialogue in the game is adorable. It is just a cute game all around. There are two main issues I have: 1. The buildings are VERY samey, which is a problem in a city management game. I cannot reliably tell at a glance what I've already built, because every building resembles every other building. I'm not interested in hovering every building to see what it is via a tooltip; I need to be able to tell at a glance what I've built and where. This game fails at that. 2. Your floating city starts off agile enough, but becomes rather slow pretty quickly. You need to divert escalating amounts of resources to city defense, as bandit raids get more intense and the difficulty curve ramps up pretty unforgivingly, meaning that the one in-game day becomes boring in less than two hours of play time. I thought that maybe I had messed up on my first playthrough and so I've tried again twice, employing different strategies each time to see if I can see my way around either of these two problems, and I can't. Good premise, cute art, frustrating/boring game play. Do not recommend.

It's fun but they made the city building part of the game simpler than in Airborne Kingdom to make place for the combat mechanics which, at least for me, weren't that fun and ended up being way too repetitive. So I'd say I liked Airborne Kingdom more than this one.

Put way too much time in this game for the creators to suddenly decide to go woke in the game after many hours played.

This is essentially the game version of Miyazaki's Castle In The Sky, which I'm assuming you've seen, since you'd have to be some sort of uncultured savage otherwise. It's a city builder, but it eliminates one of the classic constraints - you no longer have to worry about space to build. Because you're building a flying city. You have to worry about lift, balance, and pirates. Lots of steampunk bird-people air pirates. If that sentence alone doesn't sell you, we're going to have to reevaluate your status as not an uncultured savage. The world you explore, and that's the second departure from city-building, is an interesting enough place; a fallen civilization, the remnants of which are forever in need of an air-mobile platform to rebuild their world from the ashes. Or at least avoid becoming ashes. It's not too taxing as builders go, but complex enough that you've got to keep rethinking your design, putting out fires - sometimes literally - as this resource or that gets overstressed. The game itself needs to be slightly better in explaining itself - what's a minaret? Why do I need one? Where can I get one? How do I assign the relic to the minaret once I've built the damn thing? Many of these questions needed research outside the game, and the last one took a good five minutes of random button mashing before I figured it out. Graphics are good, nothing taxing, but designed well enough to be interesting without being overwhelming. No glitches as far as I can tell, sound design is good. I really like the art style, and the writing is humorous without dipping too deeply into corny. Happy with this purchase, unreserved thumbs up.

Overall decent game. The tiles with the patterns and the snow particles were a nice touch. The balancing of the city wasn't as much of an issue like I initially thought. two things that were bothersome were, the speed of the city, is incredibly slow even with max propulsion and highest game speed. The second issue I ran into might be a bit controversial but i'll name it anyway, is the DEI stuff in two quests, namely two lesbian birds marrying each other and the other quest where the npc opens up with 'hello sir and/or madam and/or other'. quite frankly it broke any immersion I had and subsequently lost my respect. If I had kids I wouldnt recommend it to them for that reason.

出乎意料的耐玩，数值设计很合理，对空间规划的要求非常对我这种细节党的胃口，能在空港自由调整建筑位置这一点就值得表扬。个人观点，不能无损调整建筑规划的游戏不配叫做模拟建造游戏。

A mix of building strategy with exploration and combat. The game is heavily stylized, with map reminiscent of a tabletop game. Characters are antropomorphic birds, displayed as tiny simplified figures in the world and quirky 2D art in dialogues. The music is meditative, staying in the background. There is no voice acting, only occational bird screech. The gameplay is a modified town builder. Production chains are very short and basic, most of the game is based on finding and management of resources, not on industrial production. There is a morale and health mechanic to consider. Since the city is flying, managing lift, propulsion and balance adds another layer, replacing mechanics from more traditional town builders. There is a lot of exploration and resource gathering to keep the city going. There are also quests, both the main story and optional side quests. These yield money and blueprints for new buildings, that can be further researched and upgraded. There are assault and defence building, since this time there is a combat and siege against pirate bases. The story does not follow from the more spiritual predecessor (Airborne Kingdom). It is instead placed in a new lighthearted world inhabited by antropomorphic birds. It is consistently positive with a fair bit of humor.

Airborne Kindom (Der erste Teil) ist ein kurzes aber sehr entspannendes Game in einem interessanten Stil. (Man darf nur Physik und Aerodynamik nicht zu ernst nehmen) Aber trotz allem eine Nette Kombination aus Aufbauspiel, Erkunden und Questen. Airborne Empire (Der zweite Teil) erweitert Airborne Kindom um einige Gebäude, Recourcen und Waffen, ja genau Waffen, Piraten halten das Land unter ihre Kontrolle und jetzt schießen wir sie vom Himmel.