Airborne Empire, developed by The Wandering Bard and co-published with Stray Fawn Publishing, is a blend of city-building, survival mechanics, and RPG elements. A successor to Airborne Kingdom, it carves out a unique niche within the “survival city-builder” genre with its cozy atmosphere that intertwines challenge with serenity.
Airborne Empire Gameplay Mechanics: A Balancing Act
Players will jump right into the flying city-building aspects of the game. The first step of any playthrough is to get your Hangar built. This will allow you to interact with the ground, gather resources, hire citizens, and help towns with their all-important side quests.
Before I dive into the game’s mechanics, I need to establish some expertise. I love city builders. Now let’s do that in an Oprah voice, “I LOVE city-builders.” As of January 2025, I have 581.1 hours invested into Clanfolk, another 142.7 hours in Manor Lords, a paltry 83.2 hours in Fabledom, as well as dozens of more hours spread out over Mirthwood, Zombie Cure Lab, One Lonely Outpost, The Planet Crafter, etc. you should be getting the idea now. I feel I am a bit of an aficionado when it comes to this genre.
So, approaching Airborne Empire, I can admit I had a bit of smugness in the early hours of the game. The game mechanics seemed straightforward and easy. Once you have the Hangar, you just left-click and gather, left-click and gather. I was pleasantly surprised by the high adorbs level of the little birby citizens, but I wasn’t giving much thought to the gameplay…until. Until it suddenly wasn’t straightforward and easy. Until I was running out of water, and food, until I didn’t have enough light, until my birbs were getting sick, and I didn’t have enough cloth to build a clinic to get everyone healthy. Then the pirates attacked.
What initially struck me as cozy and mindless quickly became complex as I needed to balance gathering, researching, producing, building, exploring, and defending.
Many of the game’s mechanics will be familiar to other lovers of the genre, but there are a couple of mechanics I want to shout out as being special to Airborne Empire.
First is ‘Lift.’’ Lift is the amount of weight your flying empire can actually keep afloat. It is determined by how much Lift your fans produce. You can always build/upgrade fans (provided you have the resources), but not keeping an eye on your Lift will find you sinking to the ground and stalled out on making progress in-game.
In addition to lift, there is ‘Tilt.’ Your flying city needs to be built evenly in order to keep it in balance. If you make one side too heavy, then your city will tilt too far, and citizens will fall right off. Managing tilt means you have to take the time to consider the placement of the next several buildings you need to make, making city planning more like chess than checkers.
The lift and tilt mechanics act as a sort of leash, preventing players from growing their settlements too quickly. This, coupled with the time it takes to research upgrades and gather materials, means there are times when players cannot do anything except look at the scenery and wait. Thankfully, the scenery is really beautiful.
Another mechanic to keep an eye on is ‘Light.’ Insufficient lighting will cause your citizens to have accidents and injuries, which will take them out of the workforce until they can heal. This mechanic, combined with the disease mechanic (which automatically triggers when your population reaches 30), really sets Airborne Empire apart from other city builders. I’m used to dealing with starvation in Manor Lords, but that game would take on a whole new level of challenge if the devs decided to introduce the plague as well!
Airborne Empire requires players to think about their citizens’ health and safety, in addition to their basic needs of food and water. Add this to managing your carrying capacity and tilt, and the game shows itself to need a lot more strategy than the initial hour would lead you to believe.
Resource Management and Economy
Supposably, things won’t always be so hard. The Research Tree allows you to choose research perks such as decreasing your citizens’ need for food and water or decreasing how much coal your city needs to stay afloat, which will, in theory, make it easier to just exist in the game rather than fight for survival.
Researching perks and upgrades can take anywhere between 2 – 32 in-game hours. I haven’t figured out the exact match, but it seems like 32 in-game hours is about 20 real-life minutes. The time it takes to research a much-needed perk, such as the Hempweaver, is a bit of a nail-biter when you desperately need cloth to be able to start to research the Clinic, and all your citizens are falling sick, so you don’t have anyone to gather resources. This is another leash put on players to up the challenge factor. And, while you’re waiting for this one resource, you’re also consuming a dozen more.
There are other options besides making your own supplies. Players can buy and sell in town marketplaces. But the options for selling are limited. Markets only want post-production goods, meaning players will have to have an Iron Forge, a Hempweaver, etc., in order to make products the towns will be willing to buy. Additional money can be earned by sending workers to explore Ancient ruins, but there is a finite number of these, so they can’t be relied on in the long term to pay for all the glass you’re going to need.
Exploration and Storytelling
Airborne Empire is not just a survival city-builder. It has RPG elements that will further pull on the player’s resources. The basic outline of the story is that your world is recovering after the fall of the Airborne Kingdom (I love the plug for the previous game). In the wake of the Kingdom’s fall, technology has been scattered, ancient wisdom lost, and bands of pirates are just making life generally harder than it needs to be. Your ability to float above it all means you’re also the perfect person to help solve these problems.
I’m not too deep into the main quest because, you guessed it, side quests have side-tracked me. Almost as soon as you sign on to save the world, you also need to start delivering supplies, locating sea creatures, mapping out watchtowers, etc. I always lean into a game’s side quests because I think they are the best indicator of how much a developer invested in the actual story. The side quests seem a little repetitive at this point in early access, but updates are already rolling out from the devs, and there is plenty of time for them to add some variety.
There is also plenty of room. The game’s map seems pretty substantive, and I think it will be a fun exercise to see how far N, W, S, E I can actually go.
Final Thoughts
Despite being Early Access, Airborne Empire is an ambitious and engaging game that stands out within its genre. With a solid foundation and a promising EA roadmap, it has the potential to become a standout title for city-building and RPG enthusiasts. Whether you’re a veteran or a newcomer to the genre, Airborne Empire is worth keeping an eye on.
Airborne Empire is out for PC via Steam Early Access.
Related: Reviews by Michelle Jones
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