Airborne Kingdom Review

There was once an ancient kingdom that thrived on knowledge, peace, culture, and living in the clouds, but many centuries later most of their technology has become lost in dusty libraries. That is until your town found blueprints that helped create the center ship that allowed you to take to the skies. You will now be tasked with building a floating kingdom, reuniting all the kingdoms, and creating a great collection of people to bring the world together and to bring peace. In Airborne Kingdom you will be in charge of managing resources and the well-being of your citizens. As your population grows you will be tasked with more areas of importance to your citizens, and as long as you keep those areas in mind you will be able to continue to grow your population.

This game lulls you in at the start and if you are not careful, which I was not, you will quickly find that you’re going to need to start the game all over again. Now this isn’t a bad thing, but I can definitely tell you that your first play attempt probably will not be your only one. There are a couple of immediate reasons for this. The first being that the layout of the game world will change. The changes will be subtle, but it is enough to keep you on your toes. Another reason is that the blueprints that you will need to purchase to unlock new technology have a bit of randomness to it. There may be a playthrough where you will find one type of propulsion in a certain part of the game, but you may not see that exact type until much later. The final reason is that as the layout of the world changes so does the placement of resources, and so your strategy to obtain and store said resources will change. 

There are three main resources that you’ll always have to keep an eye on: coal, water, and food. If you run out of coal your flying city will cease to fly. If you don’t have food or water your citizens will abandon you. I found out the importance of extra storage of those last two in one of my later playthroughs of the game. I know it makes perfect sense now, but the more people you have the more taxing they are on your resources, and it’s amazing how fast you’ll start burning through those resources if you’re not careful. Citizens are also a resource you have to think about. They will be needed to man different buildings in your city, they will be needed to build new buildings, they will be needed to gather resources, and I can’t tell you the number of times I thought I was being crafty by keeping my population low in the beginning only to get burned when it turned out I didn’t have anyone left to build the new buildings I needed to survive.

This is a challenging game, and as you go into new areas of the the map you will be faced with different challenges (less food to harvest, or less water to gather), but there is something about the overall feel of the game that does have a soothing quality, even when you’re stressing out over the fact that you’re almost out of water, food, or coal. Does this game get frustrating, of course, but there’s something about it that even if I royally screwed up I was always willing to try again and deploy a new strategy to hopefully not get blindsided by whatever caused my latest defeat. This is not a game for everyone, but it's a solid game for those who are looking for something a little different when it comes to city-builder games.