So, let me tell you my impressions of Airborne Kingdom, which is out today on Epic! As I mentioned, I know the lead designer and I playtested the game during its alpha and beta stages. So I’m totally biased, but I’m a city-builder fan and I think it’s a great city-builder.
The central premise of a flying city brings two unique elements into the city-builder mix: Exploration and tilt management. The latter means that you have to balance your buildings on each side of the central headquarters building. If you don’t, the tilting will cause some unhappiness with your population. I recall this being a concept in some other more abstract builders, but here it’s handled well–not punishing, but a good reason to optimize your layout, and to adjust things after you drop in a new building. Some buildings generate lift, which also creates negative tilt, so the dynamics are not simplistic and you can still make some unusual, asymmetric city plans.
The exploration piece means that your city travels over the map, interacting with other land-bound kingdoms, which have quests you must complete to form alliances with them. And scattered around the map are resource pools that you have to draw from to keep afloat and to keep building. Some areas of the map are scarce on different resources, so you either have to plan ahead or dash across the map for an emergency injection of clay or water or whatever. And if, like I did, you don’t prioritize propulsion buildings on your city, you could be too slow for that emergency.
The game tracks individual members of your population, who make up your workforce. They’ll get assigned to workshops or to airplanes that go out to gather resources. When you hit certain population thresholds, the peoples’ needs increase. This can be a bit of a shock if you’re not watching where those thresholds are. Suddenly your people are not perfectly happy and you have to build faith buildings or clinics or whatever.
You can shift buildings around your city, though it costs a small amount of resources each time. There is a tech tree branch that makes it cheaper and eventually free. Speaking of which: There’s a tech tree. You can make all your buildings more efficient or effective. And you unlock new buildings by buying research plans from the various nations you interact with. Those are bought with relics, which are found in special temples scattered around the map.
The music in the latest version really blew me away. And the game has, I think, a great art design. And a fantastic photo mode to go with it!
Anyway, I think it’s got a lot to offer city-building fans. It probably feels most like Frostpunk to play, with some caveats: The tone is much less bleak (yay!), there’s less emphasis on an ongoing story, and there’s really only one “scenario”–in that the campaign is the game and there aren’t multiple campaigns or scenarios or a sandbox mode. Replayability would come in the form of arranging your city differently as you play through the game again (and there are multiple build strategies). But this isn’t a game you’re going to play over and over for hundreds of hours like, say, the latest Anno.
I hope folks give it a try!