Airborne Empire

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