In 2020’s Airborne Kingdom, you cobbled together a flying city from sailcloth, smokestacks, wings and flippers, striving to meet a growing population’s need for food and shelter while dealing with the more exotic problem of levelling your streets out and generating enough lift. In the process, you explored a beautiful, Orientalist world map of faded mosaic tiles and dusty gold fittings.
In Airborne Empire, out in early access today, you do much the same again, but this time the world is trying to murder you. A bit. You are no longer alone in the skies: there are merchant dirigibles you can barter with, and pirate airships who’ll strafe your suburbs and set your bazaars on fire. As such, the sequel’s new city technologies include a choice of offensive and defensive weapons. Here’s a launch trailer.
And here’s some blurb from the creators.
“While exploring a variety of biomes, players find themselves deep in an open-world full of rich characters, dialogue choices, side-quests, and lost marvels. By helping the peoples below, they gain the knowledge to develop new technologies – including new lift, propulsion, and morale buildings. They’ll also gain access to better tools for defense – and offense – against the pirate threat; defense towers, cannons, and attack planes can be researched, upgraded, and augmented with the tools found by combing the world and unraveling its mysteries. With full systems for building upgrades, fires, sickness, injuries, light, morale, and augmentation relics, there is plenty of treasure to discover!”
I liked the original Airborne Kingdom, but had reservations about the game never quite addressing the fact that it is pretty bloody sinister. The writing frames you as a benign presence, helping out ground-bound cities and offering a new way of life to wistful souls in remote villages, but the campaign progression and overall visual spectacle tell a different story. I mean, this is a game about an empire with a mobile centre, a remorselessly expanding heavenly citadel that prowls and siphons resources from a pliant, balmy world of towns who, somehow, do not react in pure religious terror to having the sun periodically eclipsed by a dense, smoking mass of minarets and propellers.
Airborne Empire’s addition of war mechanics consolidates this reading, on paper, though the writing seems as dreamy and upbeat as ever, with a newly zoomorphic cast of chirping, cawing, squawking avian NPCs.
I pondered all this in a review for Eurogamer, back when I was a cloud-hopping freelancer. Around the same time, Nate Crowley (RPS in peace) wrote a more hopeful analysis of the game as exploring and celebrating “the role of Islamic cultures in what we think of as the Renaissance”, with a story and quests that trade on the recovery and continuity of knowledge during an age of scattering.
“From the arches and minarets of your sprawling waftopolis, to the scales the soundtrack breezes through, to the dream-like, abstract patterns which cover the opening region in place of an ocean, it’s the golden age of medieval Islam writ large,” he commented. I would love to read a longer piece on the topic from either Nate or another scholar of Islamic art.
The early access launch version of Airborne Empire is, by the developer’s own admission, “a bit bare-bones, lacking content and polish”. It features building and research, the lift and balance mechanics, city movement, and NPC dialogue. Over the course of an estimated year in early access, the Wandering Bard will “add new building types, new biomes, new events/missions and expand the background story of the game”. They’ll also do testing and QA, stir in Steam features such as achievements, and incorporate player feedback.
At the risk of making a mockery of my own gloomy sentiments about blithe imperialism, I have an itch to see how multiplayer would work in a game like this. Or at least, city-vs-city combat. Presumably, choice of layout would be decisive. I can imagine wreaking havoc at the helm of a burg that consists of a huge crescent with turrets pointing inward. Pac-City, we’d call ourselves. Anyway, you can find Airborne Empire on Steam.