Soar through the skies as you complete quests, gather and manage resources, and work to keep your kingdom balanced both literally and in service of the needs and desires of your workers. Each journey will begin on a unique procedurally-generated map encompassing three distinct areas with 12 cities to discover. Embark on a journey as a small kingdom to expand your population, researching new technologies and buildings, and forging alliances with terrestrial kingdoms. Underneath all the airy grandeur is a primal hunger – to consume, absorb, become big.Īirborne Kingdom is now available on PC and Mac.Airborne Kingdom is a stunning airborne city building and management game. In many ways, Airborne Kingdom is the floating equivalent to the city of London from Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines series. Your kingdom is all-encompassing, and it’s easy to see your inhabitants as tools to be used, and the land as a container to be continually dipped into – strip-mined, deforested and sucked dry. Like so many strategy games, things tend to slip into the realm of instrumentality, exploitation and centralised power. The gentle aesthetic hides a darker ideological framework, and I think that’s something worth bearing in mind. Your floating city travels the continent re-connecting lesser settlements, cajoling them into joining up. Like much of the Steampunk genre, there’s the issue of representing kingdoms, empires and industry as benign elements and never fully exploring their horrors. Its genial nature does however raise some concerns. A gentle clockwork kingdom that’s light to operate and as calming as the white fluffy clouds you sail by. As you grow in size you’ll need to construct additional fans to keep your city in the sky, and crucially, things like oars and propellers so the whole thing doesn’t become so bloated and heavy that it begins to crawl across the skies rather than soar.Īirborne Kingdom is a pleasant thing. If too many buildings are constructed on a single side, your whole kingdom will begin to tilt, angering inhabitants and eventually causing them to abandon you. This is complicated somewhat by having to, quite literally, balance your settlement. The downside is that these buildings need to be kept separated from housing blocks, or you risk angering the masses.īuilding your city is simple, with structures snapping onto roads. As you hoover up more stuff from the world below you’ll want to construct warehouses for storage and industry in order to attain better quality resources. High above the clouds you’ll need to balance various elements in order to keep your inhabitants happy. There are also ruins out in the world, which you can plunder for relics and then trade in for building blueprints at the larger settlements. Larger cities take more encouragement to join up, giving out simple quests to complete. In your explorations you’ll also come across other small settlements, who will either supply you with astonished citizens or give you new sets of paint and coloured metal to customise your buildings with. It’s a simple loop – gathering what’s in the area before moving on in the hope you’ll come across more on an as-needed basis. From your hangar, sets of gliders will shoot out to collect the resources, swooping down to mine for minerals, chop wood, gather food and suck oases dry. In order to keep your flying kingdom operational, you’ll need to stock up on resources.Ĭoal to feed the engine’s fires, food and water to keep your citizens working and timber to build with. Your goal is to find other cities, forge alliances and grow your settlement into a great empire. From the starting ruin you’ll venture out and discover islands of interest among the wastes. Unlike most city-builders, your kingdom isn’t tethered to the ground. The themes of the game – rekindling ancient knowledge, and the flourishing of art, culture and science – are also reminiscent of the historical era.Īirborne Kingdom. Your city, lightly coloured, with elegant, tapered arches, domed roofs and cupolas, recalls the architecture from the Islamic Golden Age. The land below your kingdom is laid out on beautiful mosaic tiles, while far off at the edges you can make out the parchment of the universe curling in on itself. Like the story, the world of Airborne Kingdom is a cartographic one – taking place upon a map so large that the scale is essentially 1:1. A sprawling landscape-as-map that recalls one of Jorge Louis Borges’ most famous short stories, ‘ On Exactitude In Science’. A flying city-fortress, you rise from sand-covered ruins, using ancient tech to lift your settlement up into the clouds and propel it onwards.įrom the air you’ll survey a vast territory. A irborne Kingdom offers a compelling fantasy.
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