Airborne Empire is a tranquil sequel that reaches for the sky | Early access impressions

A few years ago I reviewed a unique city builder called Airborne Kingdom, a pleasant enough little management sim with the fresh angle of building a city in the sky, a network of interlinked platforms held up propellers, fans, and steampunk tech that required as much effort to keep it balanced as to keep it aloft. Now the developer is back with Airborne Empire, breezing into early access with the same relaxed, accessible gameplay, but a bit more of it.

For a start, there’s a bit more to the world and story now. Your city is set up as a kind of itinerant peacekeeping force, roaming the skies over this land helping out the various settlements with all sorts of demands and requests.

You begin with a small construct, and steadily add to it with paths and buildings. The more you research, the more you can build, adding an Academy, multiple hangars, homes, warehouses, factories and forges. As you build more you’ll naturally add weight, which can not only destabilise your city but also puts strain on the fans and propellers that keep it airborne and allow you to steer. To compensate you need to think about counterweights, and make room for utilities to stay aloft.

Of course, all this building needs resources, and so you have to build homes to recruit workers from land towns. Once you have plenty of these fellas, you can send them down to strip-mine the world below, mowing through forests, iron deposits, meadows, and lakes, among other things. Food is a concern, too, as you need to keep everyone fed.

Perhaps a little weirdly, the people of this empire are all avian in appearance, even though they rely on planes and other flying machines to soar through the skies. Helping them rewards you with several boons, not least the ability to recruit more workers and thus become more efficient. But you won’t just be foraging for resources to keep them stocked up in Airborne Empire, as the sequel also introduces proper combat. Well, sort of.

Sky pirates will attack now and then, damaging your city and the towns below. You’ll need to research defensive measures, and even scramble fighters to take them down before they do too much damage. While it can be fun to have a little urgency and these pirate raids aren’t hugely common, they are kind of at odds with how tranquil the game is. And cleaning up or repairing afterwards costs time and resources.

Like Kingdom, Airborne Empire is at its best when it’s chilled out. When you’re mooching about the clouds looking for ruins to explore, resources to glean, and new towns to help like some city-sized superhero. If anything though, it just moves a little too slow for me, even when you fast-forward it. Gathering resources is slow, and movement is slower – though there are research projects to improve everything from movement speed to lift and even durability.

The world is now much, much bigger, with a large world map and multiple different biomes offering new resources as well as different visuals. It brings a fairly dramatic sense of scale to Airborne Empire, which is in keeping with the sequel’s title: after all, an Empire should be much bigger than a kingdom, and that’s really felt here. The horizon is always expanding, and with it the scope for new adventures and new discoveries.

Controlling the city is easy enough, though you don’t have completely free movement and will usually feel anchored to your flying fortress. Building, however, is incredibly simple, allowing you to drop prefab blocks and then sit and watch as your townsfolk waddle out en-masse to construct the nodes. It’s as satisfying as any city-builder to see your creation grow, and soon you’ll be tweaking colours and appearances to personalise your city.

That Airborne Empire has entered early access in more or less the same state that the first game is currently in, is promising. It shows that The Wandering Band has a plan and is determined to build upon what the team has already done to deliver something just as fresh and compelling.

Airborne Empire is available now in PC early access.