The Wandering Band developers have released Airborne Empire, the sequel to their well-loved city builder Airborne Kingdom, into early access, which has received a very positive rating on Steam as its predecessor. In this game, you will take control of a floating city that you expand over time, explore a large open world now with more biomes, and help settlements in the fight against sky pirates.

Unlike other city builders, you cannot move your town unless you want to start all over. This is not a problem in Airborne Empire, as the major hook of this game is the ability to construct a massive flying settlement. Good thing is that you can move, as resources in this world are sparse. In order to collect them, you need a hangar, which allows you to send out small planes that will fly to the surface and demolish entire forests to gain logs. As you collect more materials, you can construct new facilities connected to your town center. As in other games, you need places for your villagers to sleep, produce goods, and more. However, unlike the rest, there are a few more things to keep in mind while expanding your city. Since it is floating, you need to upgrade your turbines to keep the settlement in the air, add more propulsion engines so you can move forward, and avoid building too much to one side, or it will flip over.

While exploring the world map, you will come across multiple towns. Here is where you learn about the lore of these lands as well as the feared sky pirates. They are terrorizing the land dwellers, and so they ask you to help by completing quests. However, it is not long before the sky pirates learn of you and the danger you might pose, as you command an ancient artifact known as the capital of a harmonious empire—the airborne city of legends—and they will come to attack you. In order to defend yourself, you need to research new defenses like cannons that will shoot their planes out of the sky and keep your people safe.

As stated before, Airborne Empire is currently in early access, and the developers estimate the 1.0 update will take around a year to complete. In this time, we can expect to see more features, such as new game modes like Creative for those who just want to build the largest city they can, and a Survival mode that will make it more challenging. A New Game+ will be introduced for those who have completed the game, and to spice it up even more, a variety of difficulty settings and weather systems will be added. Regarding content, they plan to add more biomes, enemies, structures, a new pirate boss battle, and more.

Airborne Empire can be purchased on Steam and offers a 10% launch discount until January 27th.