I really want to love this game, so let's start with the positives: The airship building, the trading system and the combat are all great. The setting and lore were great to build up the world and the game's story, which made it all even more disappointing to be honest. I didn't touch the manufacture system, so I guess I can't complain about it. I loved that your optional companions had their own sidequests, and I liked the commission quests, but I disliked having main quest requirements to unlock them. Requiring the company founding would be enough in my opinion.

Now, let's list the negatives: The game has quite a few bugs and is badly optimized. The only game mechanic that is really infuriating is the travel system, for being a waste of time. Most ships are worthless because of this, as they take way too long to reach other locations. I dislike the forced companions for setting the tone of what you should and what you shouldn't be doing, especially since they are the only ones doing the talking.

But the main story is easily the worst offender as it is mostly inconclusive, opening up plot points with every side character you encounter and solving almost none of them. You have very few choices in the narrative of this game, and your character has very little impact as well. I don't understand why the story pretends otherwise. I truly believe that if the story was mostly "your company business" related instead of "world changing events" the game would be a lot better.

The game also has a really predictable "twist", and the ending doesn't leave any hooks for sandbox play afterwards, as you can only reload a save from right before the climax, with an urgent quest in your journal and on top of your screen. And, as mentioned, there are a lot of unlocks through the main story, so you can't ignore it either on a second playthrough.

This game seriously needs more polish and a way to freeplay, either after the story or as an alternative mode. It's too late to change anything major about the story, but at least the theme and worldbuilding is good.

Stopped playing, might try again sometime later. Will be listing all the negatives that resulted in this.

* If your ship is weaker, you will be defeated. There are no tactics and nothing you can do about it. Especially if it's a fight which requires you to win to progress.

* You can either sacrifice your cargo/speed for more firepower (bad decision early game) or buy new ships to help you fight (expensive solution with questionable results).

* You can only control your flagship directly. Your other ships can only be set to behaviour at which point they become fairly useless. Most of the enemy ships will chase you and situations where your escort ship is outside of the action while you are being destroyed are frequent.

* A lot of game mechanics are locked behind the story and early story missions are hard fights with a huge jump in difficulty and scripted forced fights which you lose if you are weaker making you load some previous state to prepare for it.

* Started over with a different setup (faction/starting ship and background/starting items) just to find out everything is the same (story, starting location, etc.).

* Lots of far traveling on auto pilot while using x10 speed. Gets boring and easy to get into a pirate fight

* You can pay to escape pirate fights but it's somewhat hidden and easy to forget about it after you are half-asleep due to x10 speed straight line travel

* Ship metrics are fake for the enemy. Hard to understand if you have a good chance or not. Won quite easy against some ships with "scary looking" stats. And got absolutely demolished by a group of pirates with power level 1

* Trading is boring due to long travels and production is locked behind story mode while also requiring lots of tedious traveling

---

Concept looked decent but after 5-6 hours of gameplay I don't want to continue.

Good idea and that is about it. everything else is mediocre at best.
Game is full of very annoying UI bugs and just loves to lag at rapid destruction of blocks.

Game loop is 80% flying across the map on autopilot (if you decide to play it - use cheat engine to get at least x40 time compression. i realised this too late so yeah now i have 118+ hours in here instead of maybe 20) 10% fighting against bugging UI, 5% reading dialogs and last 3% buying crap for officers and crafting and 2% fighting, on average you will spend 10 minutes of doing absolutely nothing on autopilot for barely minute (in most cases more like 20 seconds) of battle time against very dumb bots. stores take up to a week to refresh, craft is 4-30+ hours - all of it in realtime so you either just leave it running in time compression (20x max) or constantly "rest" at dock.

progression is just there and not really thought of - you can and most probably will have top tier BC and all top tier equipment not counting 3 officer related items as early as chapter 4. and its just so happens that its a meta BC.

trading and crafting is 99% useless and made even worse by constantly bugging UI. only real use is crafting top tier engines and shields so you wont be forced to wait WEEKS IN REAL TIME for store refresh.

game world is almost completely ignoring player - sure you can make everyone send hunting fleets after you but those fleets will just stay in one place even if they see you. there are also no variations in anything - no matter what you have or what you did dialogs quests etc will ignore it. you can become enemy of everything, kill ambassadors and admirals, capture hundreds of ships, sail with BC armada etc and everything will still be the same.

And story.. is a pretty bland Idiot Plot type with singular plot twist anyone who bothered to read at least something from dialogs will know as early as chapter 4 out of 7 its also completely linear. worst of all - your character is basicly nonexistant. you not only dont have a choice - your "character" doesnt even have lines. all dialogs are just npc chatting among themselves while sometimes remembering that "hey - commander is here!" to the point of never even bothering to use the name you chose at start.

Unfortunately, I have to revise my review:

The story is just really really bad! It's a straightforward railroad with absolutely no choices. Even worse, the bad guys are always one step ahead of you. One villain is absolutely untraceable until he invites you to watch his plan work out, which you have long anticipated from the story - and everyone else around should have known too, because they experienced it first-hand before. But you fail. You suspect the other villain the whole time, but here too you can only watch the catastrophe unfold. There is only one ending - you lose catastrophically both times. No other choice, no other ending.

This is really poor game design! I now finished the story - the achievement says only 0.2% of the players have done so - really no wonder at all!

***

In my opinion, there are two main problems:

1) The idea the developers have of “how the game is meant to be played”:

It just seems that absolutely everything in "Airship: Kingdoms Adrift" HAS TO BE complicated, tedious and demanding. There must be no other way in this game. And if it isn't, then it's made more tedious even against the rules of logic.

a) It starts with the current discussion and change on boarding and ship capture: From 100% to about 25% depending on Jean's skills. Setting the capture rate to 100% seemed to be the right solution - for all difficulty levels. If I am boarding a ship and battle its crew down to 0, why shouldn't I be able to take it over?! Simply from the point of logic? Apart from the fact that boarding is handled quite special anyway: There don't seem to be any grappling hooks or boarding bridges to fix ships next to each other, as usual. The other ship can still move around, the crew continues to repair it and it can even fire without taking any damage to its own hull - all while in the middle of being boarded - ok - but why by all means should I not be able to capture a completely defeated ship?! - so this is the way the game is meant to be played?

The devs answer was: “The in-world logic to this is that some/most enemies will choose to scuttle their vessels instead of letting the others have them. And in the original release, we have all ships scuttle themselves unless there's a successful persuaded at the end.”

So, in addition to the fact that many ships already have the status “cannot be captured”, almost all other captains will also choose to blow up their ship before letting it be taken over. This simply is extremely bad design and has nothing to do with logic - why board a ship at all now!?

b) And it extends to all other aspects and game content: The extreme in other games is only 3 resources like wood, metal and mana or something like that. Here on the other hand there are a good 500+ different resources, materials and intermediate products. All these materials have stacks of at most 20, many 10, 5 or even just 1. Each stack needs a place in the cargo hold and you can only buy or produce a tiny proportion of them - both in terms of quantity and type and only in a few settlements.

And that brings us to the next topic: The production route in "Airship: Kingdoms Adrift". The fact is that building even a single factory actually costs HUNDREDS of different resources. In addition, blueprints and permits, which are very rare and can only be obtained once the main quest has reached a certain level of progress. One of these, a "restricted permit", has a global counter of only ONE and can only be acquired in one place and only once a week.

And then you need even more and even rarer materials to upgrade your factories by another 2-4 ranks - and every type of the 30! or so different production facilities needs different materials. All of these materials have to be procured and transported - or produced, which is also time-consuming. This requires a fleet of optimized - and slow - cargo ships or lots of individual tours across the entire map. This is absolutely ridiculous and takes ages.

Behind it all is a huge, incredibly complex and well thought-out production system. When I finally built my first factory - just its first rank, no upgrades yet - I immediately got a shining achievement for it - because only 0.9% of players have this achievement. Which clearly shows how popular the route of production is in "Airship: Kingdoms Adrift". So the whole complex production system is basically lost, because almost no player wants to follow that route - which is no wonder, since it literally takes up ages of your lifetime. And it's really boring, since nothing else happens the whole time along the way. You travel all over the map, again and again and again, building shopping lists and production plans for days. For what reason? - but it seems this is the way "how the game is meant to be played".

I could go on and on this way - the game is absolutely beautiful and has some really awesome and well thought-out design ideas - but currently all aspects are FAR too complicated, tedious and demanding to be fun.

2) The game seems largely unfinshed:

- The world is very different from our own reality, because it is "broken" - land-masses are flying in the air and there are now apparently mana veins and streams as well as some kind of "magic" called "mana weaving". But there is no story to it - How did that happen? What is it and what consequences did it have for the world and its people? What is black and white science? - you can only guess. The game also is quite a lot about factions and politics, but even there the stories are only touched upon. The numerous "pirate factions" are unfortunately not explained in any more detail either. Neither where you find them - for the required trophies - nor why you fight against them in the first place.

- At the beginning of the game you choose yourself a name and a call sign. But neither is mentioned again in the game - not even your faction - and, above all, is not used during any conversations. In all texts and even in very personal conversations you are only called "The Commander", which sounds awkward and makes it very difficult to immerse yourself in the game.

- The game makes a very good first impression, because the texts are all voiced and the voices are well chosen and likeable. But that's only the beginning. Even in chapter 1 just a handful of quest-steps later only a few lines in between are still spoken, and shortly after that none at all for all subsequent chapters and the rest of the game.

- There are only a handful of images for all the characters in the game, so you keep coming across the same images over and over again - even during the main quest-line. A few more images would be urgently needed here.

More of an annoyance than unfinished gaming content:

- The ships are beautifully designed in terms of appearance, but the ship's grids for placing ship-parts and weapons are simply not logical and just outright annoying. Here too, it seems as if the design was deliberately chosen to be restrictive. You have a large ship, but you can hardly place anything properly on it simply because the grid is bad. It's like having a large new cruise ship, but it has no room for a proper engine. Instead, you literally have to screw 40 outboard motors onto the hull to get the thing to move at all. In the end, everyone uses the same 2-3 of the 35 or so ship designs. All other ships are beautiful, but have no practical value. Here again much content is lost simply due to bad design choices.

I really want to like the game, but the current concept just is far too complicated. You need a lot of money in the game, but of the three possible starting directions - bounty hunting, trading and production - bounty hunting is actually the only option. Trading is very time-consuming as it requires slow transport ships to really make money. And production, as mentioned above, takes an eternity. Capturing and selling ships was a passable way to make money, but the latest change now made that largely impossible, too.

I really wanted to love this game and for the first bit I did but between the UI, the persistent bugs, the cheap "we tried to make the world feel big just by making your travel times long" - hint, if you need to spend most of the game in 10x speed to keep your sanity you've done it wrong. Add all those together with the extremely weird spikes in difficulty for what seems like no reason and I have to say I can't recommend it. Its not bad but all its potential fun is behind various frustrations.

Turned out, the game was not released fully and it is STILL NOT COMPLETE.
The devs just "lost" the data before releasing it.
This is absolutely not acceptable. I do not care how many people work on this game.
There are plenty of amazing games that were done by one, two or handful of people.
3k people like it is common for Ubi$oft junk or just a few dedicated devs is equal.
The product matters.
Forgetting or losing data, is not a good sign.

Except of that, they are good people. They help, keep the fans informed, are "mostly" open for ideas, they fix ♥♥♥♥ very quickly and take care of the game.


If you genuinly need help, 60% will be very helpfull. The rest is is just pointless or "figure it out yourself" type of reply.
You will be treated like a clown if you critizise actual issues or point out the lack of potential.
On the discord they also encourage and ASK for positive reviews.
This goes against Steam rules!


The game is actually good. Really good actually, but I would not reccomend it as there are to many elemnts that make it very annoying and remove a lot of fun, but "not reccomend" does not mean it is bad. IF you like what you see, you will have a great time with game.
Sadly way to many clowns on Steam do not have the required braincells to understand, that you can like something AND admit its flaws and point out the lack of utilized potential.
I will change my review certain tasts do not feel like chores anymore.

• I like the voice acting. Quality and the actual voice actors are reallly good.
  
• The music is great. It is fitting for the game. Repetetive, but not bad.
  
• The actual combat is fun and very satisfying.
  
• Fitting is just great. once you have all equipments, you can burn a lot of time with fitting your fleet.
  
• Technically, there are plenty of bounty hunter and delivery quests. This combined with the actual combat, and crafting, there is plenty to do.
  
• The ships look stunning! While not present everywhere, the ships hwere done my someone who has real passion for ships.
  
• The citities, land and the docks are exceptionally beautiful. Those want me to explore them even further.
  
• Some of the quests are very creatively done and require some thought in to them.
  
• Lategame is very rewarding. Deliveries are relatively quickly done with the latest speed boost, the cost is dependent of your fit due to teh automated production of fuel and ammo, bounty hunting is also very rewarding if you complete a certain quest that awards high level bounties.

• The majority of time, is traveling. Not traveling perse, but with enemies catching you off guard. Traveling is realtively slow and mainly depents how many enemies you have pissed off, you need combat ships to fight them off. Going with a pure logistics ship, is not an option.
  Additionally, fuel cost is tied to travel distance, not to ships. The game effectively punishes you with fuel cost, when you dare to go fast. And for "better" ships, it is not cheap. And yes, there is a solution for that, but the expense is very high until taht point is reached.
  
• Ships, equipment and supplies are not cheap. Aquiring money is VERY difficult at the beginning. There are only 4 ways to make money. Deliveries, bounty hunting, selling loot and story qests. Everything has issues.
  
  1. With delivery you have to travel. A huge real time investment and very expensive if we concider the fuel cost. With "better" ships, you most of the time just break even. Also just focusing on speed and cargo, does not really work, as enemies will quite often catch you off guard.
     
  2. With bounty hunting, you will waste a lot of real time as well. The rewards for early bounty hunting is very low. They are weak, so you will most likely not burn as much ammo on them, but it will still reduce your net gain if you factor ammo cost, fuel cost and if you got hit for some reason, crew and material cost.
     
  3. Selling loot is very silly. This will be the most reliant way and it is still RNG. Enemies will never drop actual money, but loot. Valuable stuff is quite rare thought. To sell the regular drops, Fuel, Ammo, Material boxes, you need free cargo space as they do not stack. Also shops have a limited amount of money.
     
  4. The story ends. It will get you 1 to 2 million of money, but you need a higher investemnt in ships and fits to be able to fight certain enmies.
• Crafting and manufacturing is painful and the opposite of fun and rewarding. Enjoy having excel sheets that are bigger than Eve and then TRAVEL BY YOURSELF to get the ressources.
  
• Upgrading your fleet is very painful as you need a lot of money to buy ships and new mudules and there is a restock timer. For the good ♥♥♥♥, it is up to 6 ingame days. This is crazy high!
  
• The world is deader than my love-life You can rob people, but there is no interaction or faction fights. The skies are full with ships and NPCs. But there are effectively 3 factions. You, everything that is maked as red and braindead NPCs. Why is there no police that protects cities? This is the worst world I have encountered in a game so far.
  
• AI. The AI is absolutely brain dead. First off there is no pathfinding. If you bounce against something, enjoy getting stuck, stopped ot change your direction for ever. Yes, this is not technically AI but fows in to each other. Your companions have certain commans during combat, but they are meaningless. You have NO control on what they will do. They will just drive off in to the sunset (best option), sit there and eat glue OR (This is the worst) just hug the enemy and get instantly melted.
  
• The performance is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. They add particles everywhere.
  
• Certain enemies start under certain conditions. This is something I do not like at all, as it can be very difficult to find them.
  
• The Difficulty is BS. If you made the mistake by destrying a collector (they will hunt you down) this will trigger stronger enemies. You will not be able to win against them. As soon as you have ONE well fitted Battlecruiser, there is NOTHING that will beat you. I like the mid game, but late and early just sucks.
  
• Becasue the world is open and all fights create arenas, there is point of diffrent ships. Just take the biggest. Done.

• The cost of reccouces like fuel and ammo has already a solution in the game. 3 items that create them.
  Funny enough, there is no supportship that can focus on it as those modules are fittet to the same slot as energy generators. That's why I want a class of ships that focus on prodction. Does not need to have a lot of cargo or offensove capabilities. Preferably a carrier, that focuses on outer cargo slots and a surplus of command slots. Also buff the parasites. Speed primarely.
  
• Crafting and manufacturing is bad. Make it like Satisfactry. Every factory has transports who can be assigned to certain routes, to get the reccources.
  
• Increase the early reward of delivery and bounty hunting.
  
• Intorduce and actual quest log. It is very easy to forget or skip certain quests. They are decent, but an item in the treasure cargo will dron with the rest.
  
• Make the sky alive! Make pirates attack civilians, make police attack pirates. Do something. Not nothing.
  
• Award money as a combat reward in addition to the loot.

I want to like this game, but the UI and story just won't let me.

There is SO much potential buried beneath layers and layers of useless information, extra button clicks, extremely long travel times where you do precisely nothing other than busy work (Want to go across the map? You have to fast travel between about 5 cities to refuel and it will take you easily over an hour).

Seriously could be a successor to sid meier's pirates or the perfect mount and blade air ship construction game if it would just get out of the way of itself.

But it takes SOOO long to do everything, 85% of the story is boring small talk (like did you hire writers to write this stuff? Or get two AI to talk to eachother or something as it seems like the latter...) and the good parts (combat and ship building) are a tiny -- TINY -- fraction of what you actually do... like 5% of your time at best, that I can't in good conscience recommend this game in its current state.

At least devs are listening on the forums, but I don't think they actually understand the core problems that would have to be fixed for this to rise to a great or must play game.

It would need:
- Complete story rewrite, reducing the read and voice acted lines by AT LEAST 75% but more like 90%
- Complete UI rebuild - way of interacting (left click exits menus???), endless nested menus in towns - like some towns have 20+ potential destinations in nested menus including 5+ different stores... for... reasons, and general clunkiness - for example 21:9 support is enabled by turning on the right and left parts of the screen, but the are not interactive areas, so you can't left click on them to exit menus, which effing drives you insane when you are spending EASILY 50% of your time buried in menus
- Serious reconsideration of the economy. There are probably 500+ different resources in the game and from what I can tell, there is ZERO reason to interact with 95% of them. Case in point: I bought some cheap tin at a tin mine and carried it around to ALL of the major settlements in the central area of the map. Not ONE place wanted to buy it for more than 10% of what I paid for it. Compared to other trading games where you can buy stuff at a mine and take it to a factory for $$$. There is NO WAY this is getting fixed as there are so many commodities it would take 10 full time economists to fix it.
- Combat needs the ability to control your other ships as well. It's overall great and super fun, but you could run the same battle 5 times and get completely wiped OR kill all enemies without taking damage just based on what your stupid AF AI ships decide to do with the exact same commands

I genuinely wish the team good luck, but I wouldn't hold my breath on this one.

A game that tries to do many things and does them all... "meh."

- It wants to be a real-time strategy game but the real-world clock moves at a snail's pace even at 10x speed and travel time between even the beginning areas is both empty and boring. And you keep having to click on the time acceleration because everything you do resets it.

- It wants to be a real-time action simulator, but air combat is incredibly clunky. Hero unit buffs require you to constantly baby them, the UI gets in the way of everything, and controlling a ship in combat is both sluggish and random. There's far too much effort needed to control every variable (most of which are never explained) and every aspect of a fight if you don't want each fight to take 30+ minutes, and then rewards are pitiful because they feel like they're all intended to be minor skirmishes.

- It wants to be an economics/trading simulator, but the UI for company and factory systems are clunky, trading takes so long (again, even with 10x speed) that you're better off Alt-Tabbing out of the game to do other things while you wait, and even setting up the trading systems is a massive grind.

- It wants to be an RPG, but your character has basically zero input with NPCs always talking for/over you and making you seem like a doormat. There's ship customization, but there's too much depth without any real value; why spend 2 hours customizing your ship when the default layout gets you practically the same results, and you're expected to swap ships frequently.

There's a lot of promise with the setting and parts of the systems here, but overall it feels both undercooked on the story side and UI elements, and overwrought with time-wasting and extraneous mechanics.

Its not terrible, but I plan to refund it, so I'm not going over 2 hours.
Airship Kingdoms Adrift feels almost exactly like many space exploration games. Yes you are on a planet, but you never make contact with that planet. Your adventure takes place in the void between floating continents and you never stop flying, so it feels like a space game with the assets changed to a steampunk setting.
You start off with a small but functional ship, you are expected to explore, make money, engage in combat, and complete missions for people you like and people you don't like. It has a pretty good story and solid voice acting, wonderful graphics and sound, and the floating combat is fun for a short while.
This game probably qualifies as one of those "miles wide, inches deep" titles. At first it seems like you can do a lot, but the combat gets boring and tedious quickly, the trading system is incredibly basic, and the side missions get stale. There is some shipbuilding but its mostly just swapping out parts for ones you like better. The actual superior parts take up more space, so realistically you cant do much serious upgrading until you get a larger ship, and that requires lots of grinding. Like some similar space exploration games, your cargo hold is actually quite small, so most trading missions take multiple trips to complete, and you will not be able to capture too much enemy loot after completing a combat encounter. On that note, its difficult to avoid combat if you are just trying to traverse between ports or mission objectives. Much more difficult that similar games of this genre. And combat generally runs slow, and even if you win chances are you've burned thru lots of ammo and materials and will need an immediate pit stop at the nearest port which may or may not be able to buy your loot or trade goods. This only slows down gameplay further. I'd compare it to something like the first Rebel Galaxy, only slower and less fun. And you cant easily run from pointless combat encounters.

I kinda like the premise, I love the visuals, but as gameplay goes its inferior to most similar exploration games. Being set in a steampunk world with airships doesn't actually make it more fun, it just looks nicer.

I realty want to love this game but sadly the game really can't work out what it wants to be.
Building air ships and slowly improving part by part and testing them in sky battles is amazing. There is so much thought put in to the systems with multiple ship frames and variant parts. Building gun ships, shielded boarding vessels, huge fighter carriers I lost hours in to building ships and regret none of it. The world is a lot of fun to explore and learn with trade roots, faction shops, and followers to find.
However the story... it feels so tacked on it should have been good way to give some guidance in the early game but it is about 50-60 HOURS too long. Its so clear that the episodic patching the game had doomed the content to be a never ending slog with no end. I can't count the number of times it sends you someone for them to send you too two other places and then come back only to be sent back to the person who sent you there in the first place oh wait now go back to them again and so on for hours and hours. Its worse than most MMO's in its playable content and this is a fully single player experience. Worst of all a lot of the good parts of the game are locked behind this progression so if you want to have fun better lock in for a few hours flying back and forth doing nothing.