CLOUD CITY

AIRBORNE KINGDOM is a city builder where your only enemy is gravity.

- Fraser Brown

I have built a lot of cities in games over the years, and I’ve given my citizens plenty of reasons to flee them. In Cities: Skylines, I flooded their homes in liquid poo. In Surviving Mars, I left them to suffocate. In Anno 1800 – and this is the one that’s actually left me most ashamed – I failed to provide them with enough sausages. Airborne Kingdom, however, is the first city builder where I’ve lost people because the city was leaning too much.

Before this became a review, my plan was to play an hour of Airborne Kingdom to get some gifs, but instead it ended up stealing most of a day, with me finally leaving my floating metropolis at around midnight (maybe a bit after). And then I kept coming back for more. I’m an easy mark for a city builder and rarely manage to escape their grasp quickly, but Airborne Kingdom still manages to lodge itself in its own niche thanks to some unusual experiments and its own spectacular style.

The basics are familiar and conventional: you build simple production chains and infrastructure to fulfil the needs of the city and its denizens, with the demands of both getting more complicated as you expand. Power, food, factories, morale-boosting diversions – there’s loads to build, but you’ll recognise all the categories. All this is happening in the sky, though, and that’s a pretty substantial wrinkle.