Kotaku Weekend Guide: 5 Amazing Games We Just Can’t Quit

Play it on: PC

Current goal: Stay afloat

I’ve been having a very pleasant time this week chilling out to Airborne Empire. It’s a sequel to 2020’s Airborne Kingdom by the small team The Wandering Band and it recently came out in Early Access on Steam. The big gimmick of the original was that it took your standard city-builder formula and thrust it into the clouds. In addition to managing citizen morale and expansion with limited resources, you also had to make sure your city in the sky didn’t tip over or fall out of the clouds. And instead of being stuck in one spot, your burgeoning metropolis was constantly on the move.

Airborne Empire expands on that with a much bigger map, a more involved story, and the need to defend against marauding sky pirates. The new combat adds a layer of urgency to the city-builder part of the game, and it generally looks prettier and more expansive than the original. The soundtrack by Paul Aubry is also lovely, at times feeling like a mix of Aaron Copland’s grand pastoralism and the intimate melancholy of French impressionist chamber music. It’s perfect for spending hours toiling away on your own whimsical version of Howl’s Moving Castle. It’s content-lite and not very challenging at the moment but there’s plenty of room for more complexity, fine-tunning, and growth in the months and years ahead. An early content roadmap points to a survival mode, difficulty levels, weather, more enemy and building types, and lots of other stuff coming in the future. — Ethan Gach

Play it on: PC, Xbox, PlayStation, Switch

Current goal: Face Godzilla, and survive!

I have a complicated relationship with Fortnite these days. I feel it’s fallen very far from the game it was in its spectacular first year when there were no bots, when each match flung skilled and unskilled players alike into a clusterfuck of contingency and comedy and loss. Now, that bracing experience is gone, replaced by a lukewarm bath in which most opponents you encounter are bots doing a half-hearted performance of attack while actually serving themselves up to you for execution on a silver platter. Gone, too, is the game’s ethereal, mysterious hint of a story, largely left open to interpretation. Now, it’s all MMORPG-style quests and chatty characters spelling out standard video-game lore, all while more and more characters from popular “IPs” (blech) hit the shop each week, eradicating whatever distinctive identity of its own Fortnite might have once had and turning it into a corporate dystopia a la Ready Player One.

And yet, I’m not immune to Fortnite’s pull. It’s still a game in which I can really feel the terrain under me; I love the ease with which I can run, slide, leap, and mantle across its map. On a hard day, I still have a habit of logging on and quickly busting out three daily quests to earn some easy XP, an activity I can get lost in for a bit. And I’m definitely not immune to Fortnite’s spectacle, especially in those moments when it does something wild at a scale that few other games could match. Right now is just such a time as Godzilla, king of the monsters, has a chance of spawning in each match. I saw a video online of what it’s like to play as the big guy and it looks incredible, the sense of scale and his destructive power all seeming just right. This weekend, I suspect I’m gonna play way more Fortnite than usual, hoping to experience the sheer size of all that destructive power from the viewpoint of a puny human and running for my life from something that actually feels incredibly dangerous. So hey, if you happen to be playing Fortnite this weekend and you turn into Godzilla and then see me as a tiny speck running around way down below, please don’t hurt me. I mean you no harm! — Carolyn Petit

Play it on: Mobile

Current goal: Be an amazing daddy

OK, I’m lying about playing this game in the next few days, although now that I say it, I really do fancy playing a bit more ZooKeeper. I was so good at that game on DS. Like, legitimately good. I looked up high scores online once, and mine were in the top 10 worldwide. I’m never good at anything like that, so I’ll live off it for the rest of my life. But that’s not the point, because like I said, I was lying.

I’m getting a pet panther chameleon this weekend! She’s a gorgeous nine-month-old young lady, the derpiest creature you could hope for, and given female chameleons’ short lifespans and fraught natures, I’m going to give her the best damn life a little lizard can have. The vivarium is ready, the basking points are so good, it’s all up to temperature, there’s so much cover, and that’s all I’m going to do or care about all weekend. — John Walker

Play it on:

Current goal: Figure out what I’m doing

I’ve never played a full Monster Hunter game, but with Monster Hunter Wilds on the way, I feel like I need some kind of onboarding. These games are dense and systems heavy, and jumping into the deep end is scary. World, as best I can tell, is the closest equivalent to Wilds, and I think this is pretty much gonna be a tutorial for me to understand what I’m getting into. Over the years, I’ve been told Monster Hunter might be too complicated and I might lose interest quickly. But as they say, nothing ventured, nothing gained. — Kenneth Shepard

Play it on: Xbox

Current goal: Make more progress

During my holiday vacation, I finally started playing Yakuza 0. This is something I’ve been meaning to do for years now. I’ve seen so many of my peers praising the game and sharing outlandish or cool clips of the series online and yet, I had never tried any of them.

So I took Luke’s advice and started with Yakuza 0 and I’m happy to report that I’m having a mostly good time. I do find myself sometimes getting a bit bored with the endless fights, especially because I feel like it’s really easy to just spam your way through them. But the soap opera narrative involving yakuza clans and families has me gripped. The real question is will I play any more Yakuza games after I finish this one? Stay tuned. — Zack Zwiezen