Airborne Empire Review for Steam

Airborne Empire Review

The last aerial RPG I’ve played was Divinity: Dragon Commander, but Airborne Empire advances my love for mobile bases. This title is a treat for players who have played Fallout 4 and wanted to command the Prydwen.

Airborne Empire is described as an aerial RPG and citybuilder that blends role-playing, building, and open-world exploration in the clouds. You command a flying city inhabited by cute lowpoly bird people. You send workers out to the world through a hanger to collect resources and conduct missions for you. It is a fairly unique experience because you are resource managing, expanding, researching, moving, recruiting, and taking on missions – all at the same time.

The main menu upon start up lets you choose from different scenarios. You can access Adventure Mode, Hard Mode, Pacifist Mode, Creative Mode, and Survival Mode. The Survival Mode is geared towards players who are up for the challenge: 20 waves of increasing intensity. Creative Mode is the exact opposite where you can freely build all the structures for free and enjoy the building process. I think Adventure Mode is a nice, sweet spot, offering a balanced approach, quests, and the opportunity to save the world from pirates.

The world map is beautiful. Flying high obviously exposes you to a vast view of the biomes and towns around you. At nighttime, you can get a view of all the settlements in your immediate view via lanterns. I enjoy that everything feels like a living and breathing world. Your workers are constantly moving around, bustling around. You also see the inhabitants in the ground cities living their lives too like a busy beehive. Similar to the Mount and Blade titles, you can recruit more feathered friends to come aboard your flying city as you go.

There are other subtle things to keep in mind while playing. For example, you need to balance out your city sprawl to avoid excessive tilting. You need to keep an eye on your resources and make you maintain your supplies, especially coal, food, and water. However, you also need to pay attention to the weight accumulating on your flying city: this negatively affects lift and can dramatically slow you down.

I am fairly early in my playthrough, but I am having a good time. I am constantly pausing and playing, sending out my birds to do all sorts of things. You encounter some quirky characters along the way too. This title offers a unique experience. I think a fair score for this game is a 9 out of 10.

Airborne Empire is available for PC via Steam.

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John Pruitt

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I like to think of myself as the average Joe who grew up alongside video games. I have fun playing strategy games, RPGs, shooters, sandboxes, the whole shebang! Every game provides an experience whether it strikes you as profound, mundane, or someplace in between. I'd like to weigh in my two cents before you spend a single penny.