It's a pretty and intricate, game-length urban puzzle founded on a core of simple resourcing missions, with art direction that blends Disney Orientalism with Studio Ghibli. What you get is a handsome, engrossing eight-hour city-building sim whose big trick, as in the Homeworld series, is that your base of operations is also your means of travel. What it will do then is, as the saying goes, a story for another day.Īs the above hopefully suggests, it's easy to imagine a much nastier version of Airborne Kingdom than the game you get. Once it has allied with every nation on earth and hoovered up enough people, the Airborne Kingdom will form a Great Council and bring about the Prophecy's completion. At longer intervals, it adds new rotors, wings, propellers and fans to keep its increasingly misshapen bulk aloft. And above all, people - people to spin the Kingdom's sails and shovel coal into the engines, people to staff the kilns and smelters, haul goods to its warehouses and tend its vertiginous farms.įor every fresh shipment of bodies the Kingdom must expand, wrapping clip-on paths and stackable dwellings around itself like another layer of treebark. A formal alliance consummated by an hourly tribute of wood, iron or cloth, transported by air (the other kingdoms have no planes to begin with, but the Airborne Kingdom is only too happy to build them a skyport). Technologies to research for new building types, traded for relics obtained from ruins around the land. The Kingdom carries out all these requests graciously - it very frequently arrives with the necessary materials already in hand - but it has demands of its own. Others simply need wood and cloth to build new homes. Another asks it to carry three scholars to neighbouring cities. One asks the Airborne Kingdom to track down a special breed of tree to repopulate a sacred grove. While not always receptive to these promises of a golden tomorrow, the surface kingdoms are willing to pledge loyalty in return for a couple of favours, typically of the "fetch this" and "supply X of Y" variety. When it encounters such places it descends in greater earnest, blotting out the sun and filling the ears of the locals with its Prophecy - the legend of the Airborne Kingdom as unifier of humanity, stepping stone to heaven. The Kingdom will be back for them, once its existing residents are happier.Ī little less often, the Kingdom comes across another kingdom - a towering sandstone palace or a jaunty stack of windmills, its name embossed on the ground nearby. Others are resistant, put off by hints of dissatisfaction in the streets above. Some surface-dwellers are easily won over by tales over high adventure. It sends emissaries to gather up the people of the earth and transform them into creatures of the air. Occasionally, during its grazing, the Kingdom uncovers a town, a tiny toe-nail clipping of huts and cooking fires, poking from the dusty mosaic tiles and cracked flagstones of the map. Lakes are drained in hours, hillsides sucked clean of ore, forests hacked to stubble before they've even cleared the Kingdom's shadow. The landscape is swiftly exhausted, though many of the key resources regrow almost as fast. As it coasts between clouds, painted planes slide from curving hangar bays, falling like windblown embers toward patches of coal and timber. It has to keep moving because it has to keep eating. The Airborne Kingdom roams the skies, a vast, rattling amoeba of propellers and minarets, hissing forges and thundering gears. A lovely, mildly experimental city sim with some sinister undertones it never tries to explore.
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