I’m always looking for unique takes on the City-Builder genre. Games that take the genre in a new direction usually are right up my alley. Airborne Kingdom takes what you know and love about City-Builders and brings it to the sky. Just like its setting, the potential with Airborne Kingdom is as wide open as the sky itself.

After an ancient civilization fell, all that remained of its technological marvels were legends, tapestries of history, and the technology to make flying cities. After kingdoms divided, a group set out to rebuild the ancient Airborne Kingdom and unify the people. Can you help them solve the mysteries of the tapestry and rebuild the world?

To begin with, the main mechanics of Airborne Kingdom involve balance, lift, and resource management. As a flying city, the efficiency of your kingdom’s travel depends on whether the city is balanced. As a result, that means you want to make sure that the weight on each side of the kingdom is even. This gets more complex later on, as certain facilities will need to be placed further from housing areas, and some facilities weigh the city down more than others.

Once you get the Academy, you can research new types of facilities and technologies. This will allow you to upgrade existing facilities, as well as add things such as new buildings and upgrades to your various resource storage facilities such as food silos and water silos. You will also be able to expand the general storage of things like wood and stone. You begin with a small number of citizens, who will need to be sent to the surface via the hangar in order to collect resources.

If you keep your settlers happy and make sure their needs in terms of food, water, and shelter are met, then when you find settlements on the surface you will be able to get more recruits. This will allow you to split the work more evenly but will require you to generate more resources to feed and support them all. You will also be able to add more propellers and propulsion devices in order to increase your kingdom’s speed.

On the ground, there are a variety of resources, things like water, stone, wood, and more. You’ll need these things to make more buildings. However, you can also generate buildings that allow you to refine these resources to unlock new capabilities and facilities that will help you survive and thrive even more. As you progress into new regions in the story mode, the settlers you recruit will have different wants and needs.

As a result, keeping your technological research going, along with making sure resources are plentiful, can be vital to your success. You will have to move your city/kingdom across the map to get access to resource nodes, and once you empty them they will need time to refill. Also, moving to new lands helps you get more people in your kingdom and fulfill the quests of the tapestry.

I’m not going to go into too many more details about the gameplay, because some of the fun of it is the discovery. However, I will say that I would recommend giving this a try on PC if you can unless you need the controller for some reason. Moving things around to place buildings or paths is much easier with a mouse than a joystick, especially with having to maneuver the camera and cursor independently. It can be a little annoying, but it isn’t a huge deal-breaker.

Airborne Kingdom feels like Civilization with a few new mechanics that really make things interesting. Overall, if you like City-Builders or Simulation games, then Airborne Kingdom has a lot to offer. There’s a reason the game won a BAFTA after all. Visually it is unique and beautiful, with a great soundtrack and lots of great gameplay.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Airborne Kingdom was provided by Freedom Games for this review.

Phenixx Gaming is everywhere you are. Follow us on Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram.

Also, if you’d like to join the Phenixx Gaming team, check out our recruitment article for details on working with us.

Phenixx Gaming is proud to be a Humble Partner! Purchases made through our affiliate links support our writers and charity!

Airborne Kingdom

$24.99

9

Score

9.0/10

Pros

• Beautiful Visuals
• Creative and Unique Premise
• Interesting Mechanics
• Beautiful Soundtrack

Cons

• Controls are a Little Finicky