While I expected this to be more of a management sim, everything is more hand-crafted than emergent. With that said, it has been 15 hours with a constant barrage of new things to do and places to go to. I do enjoy the action and the story line more than I expected. The VA ended after about 2 hours in but characters voice is still plaything at the back of my mind when I go through conversations.

Pros:
- Been a long time since a game like this shows up
- I like airship, especially design like these
- Ship customization is pretty deep, even though not free-form
- Lore on every bit of descriptions, better grammar would help though
- There is an actual story going on
- No PvP achievement
- Worth the price tag, don't expect AAA stuff

Cons:
- Not really a living and interactive world, just a lot of scripted set of events, a lot
- Have to figure almost everything out, tutorials only cover basics
- Seems like there will be more content, there's no empty place, it just that some settlements only have generic things
- Need a lot more QoL to make use of tons of cool features in it

Conclusion: I wish stuff like this show up on steam more frequently...

- Starsector (but aren't expecting a hyper sci-fi setting)
- Sunless Sea (but are okay with a much more forgiving difficulty curve)

- A game that still has some polish being worked on (quite actively, if you check their Discord) and are okay with a product that's perhaps 80-85% complete

- Some gorgeous scenery and visuals as you sail around
- A solid, decent, and intuitive ship-designing experience with a variety of familiar to unexpected weapons, from cannons to birds with lasers
- Top-notch storytelling and world-building, which is what I would honestly say carries the game the most due to its mix of subtlety and scale
- A generally relaxed game with a somewhat uncommon niche overlap of naval and steampunk
- To support a small indie group that put out a surprisingly solid offering for said niches, not holding back anywhere as far as I can tell despite the obvious risks of tackling such a narrow niche

This is one of those cases of world-building done absolutely wonderfully; you have a game set on an Earth that has been changed drastically by some manner of event, but all of it has a strong sense of being "in the distant past" and no one really thinks about it on a day to day basis, heck no one even really knows what happened and most don't care about that. When you peak at the lore as it has been shown so far and what is only slightly mentioned, including knowledge of much larger areas below and apparently above the "map" you can traverse in-game, it can make the game area feel quite small despite the fact that it can take tens of minutes to get from one side of the map to the other on fast forward time, and I think that's quite a nice juxtaposition from a world-building perspective, adding an excellent sense of scale.

NPCs in the game are portrayed as worrying more about life and survival. There is so little exposition forced down your throat compared to other games where writers are perhaps a bit too desperate to get you to understand their world in a hurry; in Airship the rate at which you learn about historical events, the factions, etc. is very gradual, with just a smidgen there thrown in in dialogue, another slight bit explained in the tool-tip for an item somewhere, or a new area mentioned as part of an officer's story.

The character voice-acting is not fully implemented for all story missions just yet, but for the sections that are done the voice-cast is quite diverse and skilled, capturing the familiar elements of "Europa" without sounding over-exaggerated.

The steampunk aesthetic blends with elements of fantasy via "mana" and its history, something the game quite cleverly denotes as "black" science and "white" science as it ties it into the history and mentality of factions, while not making them monotonously stereotypical ("Me think black science good, white bad, me say so") and expressing a sort of competitiveness between the factions and researchers of both sides; a lot of the item tool-tips even refer to the overlap between faction equipment due to historical events and research.

The difficulty curve is quite forgiving in my opinion, but the game also has a nice habit of punishing you for getting lax in upgrading your ships between story missions; if you decide to only survive on story mission income without exploring side-quests, trading and manufacturing for more money to spend on ships and equipment, you can run into battles down the line that are surprisingly difficult. You also need to have a sensible outlook on things since even in the starting areas you can - if you actively chase them or foolishly run into them - encounter enemies that you probably can't defeat; this might be quite familiar for anyone who previously played Starsector. Fortunately, the game lets you either run away from those fights or pay off the enemy to make them leave you alone, rather than making it an instant "game over".

For combat you have a lot of leeway when it comes to ship design, as while some ships may have an interior schematic that suits certain play styles more than others, there's no "hard" lock between faction ships that prevents you from using the weapons, shields, armor, generators, and internals of another faction; you can put more shields on a faction ship that generally relies on armor if you want, or rely more on cannon weapons on a faction ship that canonically uses mana weapons, or vice versa.

The gameplay elements of combat, trading, manufacturing and exploring mesh together quite nicely since a lot of the best equipment needs to be manufactured by yourself, requiring you to explore and find the right workshop or shipwright to invest in (often requiring you to trade or do side missions for the money) as well as to find locations that sell some of the rarer items needed for said manufacturing. Some of those items may also need to be unlocked by doing side-quests to earn faction trust, but the element of faction trust isn't too in-depth unlike say, Starsector, where it's quite difficult to be on friendly terms with *everyone*; in Airship you can gain access to just about all the faction commission stores without too much effort or tediousness.

The manufacturing system is quite well fleshed out; the economy isn't dynamic, it is static as prices remain fixed everywhere, but until you figure out those routes it can seem rather daunting. The game shows off a rather nice bit of depth in this area, from basic resources like minerals, metals and wood types which you can get from mines and forestries, to intermediate products like furniture, ingots, plates and "clockwork" computers, all the way up to ships and equipment which you make via those intermediate products. It gives you the freedom to choose where you want to start off with manufacturing or how far you want to take it, so if you only want to say make ships and equipment you can just buy intermediate products from places where they are sold at a decent price, while also letting you start at the base if you are so inclined; almost all the stages allow you to turn a profit, and that accessibility is a nice plus.

This one kinda surprised me since I really didn't go into an indie game made by a small group expecting wonders, but the scenery at certain times of the day (the game has a day/night cycle) is pretty darn amazing.

There has been effort put into cloud cover, water shaders on lakes, and even individual trees throw off their own shadow; heck even the clouds near dawn and sunset have their shadows that overlap with each other and fall on the surface of floating islands, which all-in-all did catch me by surprise. Clouds have their own slight movement and position which shift based on your ship's heading and speed, rather than them seeming "baked" in and monotonous.

At night time a lot of the green "mana" effects around your ship are exaggerated due to the darkness, and you see small specks of various-sized mana drops drifting along past your ship as it moves, slowing down and speeding up as you go faster or slower; the skybox at night and day isn't particularly amazing, but those minor effects along with little details like the lights on your ship coming on tied things together.

These elements added to the game's somewhat gentle and laid-back nature, a sort of polish I was not expecting since I'd gone into it just for the naval aspects of ship-building, design, and combat. Even though travel tends to take a lot of time from A to B these elements have not made it tedious despite almost three days of continuous play on my part, and I still find myself often turning off the game's fast-forward system, letting my ships drift along at normal speed to watch the somewhat majestic gait and sense of scale the game has while taking screenshots.

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.

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.

First all since the update that resolved the launch issues, the game is significantly better. There are still a few missing features and a bit of missing content, but its minuscule compared to how the game was at launch.

As someone who has been extensively involved in the pre-release closed betas I can say the developers are some of best in in the business when it comes to listening to community feedback and adjusting their game accordingly, most serious bugs are patched within a day and they're always discussing the game with the community on discord, so I do recommend joining it.

I think if you're looking for the x4 experience of being an industrialist, currently that's the worst aspect of the game as the ability to automate industry isn't in the game yet and while you can queue up various things to produce it still needs the player to occasionally ferry and sell personally.

Otherwise the combatant/trader pathways are pretty well fleshed out and work very well, there's still a bit that could be done to improve combat and trading, but compared to how the game launched it is significantly better.

Pros:

The ship customisation system, it is full of different trade-offs and that makes it exciting and there are many different ways to outfit your ship that although these decisions don’t make a difference to how your ship looks, they do drastically change how it performs. This doesn’t make buying new and different ships obsolete though, different airframes have different stats so a military style frigate, will never be as good at ferrying cargo as a purpose built freighter, but you can give it a good go.

The combat system is incredibly fun and this links heavily into the aforementioned customisation system, do you want to build a ship that uses speed and long range weapons to kite enemies from a distance or do you want to build a bruiser that uses short range cannonades and heavy armour to get into range and blast the enemy to smithereens, both approaches are possible and a whole myriad of approaches in-between. Oh, and combat sometimes starts off with a bit of trash talk before the fight, which I enjoy.

The lore for this game is incredibly deep and speaks to ambition of the development team for where they want to eventually take this game. Its not incredibly well integrated into the game at the moment, you have to look for it, but it is there and I do recommend looking, playing close attention to cinematic that plays when you start the game up, as there are a few bits of lore that you would otherwise miss.

The story, while it may not be everyone's cup of tea, is something that I enjoy. Its not at first glance the most serious of games, with some quite humorous dialogue, but I think that this somewhat campy exterior hides a far more serious narrative underneath that does explore some interesting issues.

Another pro for me is the general aesthetic of the game, I love how the different faction’s ships look and while I know its not unique really like how they’ve built their world of floating islands.

Cons:

Graphics, unfortunately it has to be said that if you’re looking for the next greatest thing in graphical fidelity this game isn’t it. While sometimes the game can get you caught up in the moment and having you go “Wow my ship looks really cool in this sunset”, in reality it doesn’t actually look that good. That being said, criticising the graphics is quite harsh considering this is a very ambitious game and personally I’m glad they’ve put effort into other parts of the game, instead of focusing on graphics and having to reduce the scope of the game.

There’s also a certain level of roughness about the UI and many QoL features aren't really there, but the developers after fixing the problematic launch data, have said this is their next main focus. This kink of lnks in with the industrial element of the game feeling a bit rough,

Finally there’s also the optimisation issue. The game at the moment is a bit of resource hog, though most of these problems can be fixed by turning down the graphical settings. This has been improved with various patches and hotfixes, so I don't really know the current state of the issues, but recently people have been saying its much improved.

Overall:

The game certainly isn’t without its faults, but I personally think its worth a recommendation, as I think if you’re okay with a game that’s a bit rough around the edges, there is a brilliant game here, especially after the developers fixed the buggy data that hampered its potential at launch

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.

Good game, can reccomend. Its fun and they did a lot of quality of life changes, like remove cipping from the escorts and add an easy to track journal and trade overview for the cities.

Old:
The game is fun, the trading and battle mechanics works reasonably well,
BUT the amount of time is spend watch my escort ships ♥♥♥♥ around, get stuck or prevent me from moving, because the AI pathfinding is beyond broken, is too damn high. The amount of times I had to reload the game because I could not run from encouters because the two ships following me got stuck on each other is frustrating.
Like there is no point to them having collision in travle mode, especially if the AI cant handle it.
Having collision in battle is fine, the AI still sucks and needs constant babysitting to not suicide into the next battleship.
There is more stuff to be said here, but as half the game is watch you ship travle, pathfinding being no existant is the worst.

If the polish the game some more its an easy recommend, there is much to like here.

Just so you know, Airship: Kingdoms Adrift is an extremely janky game.
- Its story is an insanely long chain of fetch quests with a very, very weird ending (massive spoiler: half of the friendly NPCs commit mass suicide by attacking you with sad faces).
- Its ship editor is extremely cumbersome, and the inability to save incomplete ships is an infuriating time sink.
- Its extensive production mechanics lack automation and can only appeal to micromanagement junkies.

Normally, I would be extremely mad at this game and would have ragequit a long time ago. However, I didn’t because the game's style, visuals, and overall atmosphere are just too good. I love these huge steampunk ships so much that I could waste an hour or two outfitting them tile by tile, all the while cursing about how unwieldy the ship editor is. And I enjoy watching them fight, even despite the fact that the game lags and turns into a slideshow because of the sheer amount of projectiles they spew.

Also, developers are working on the game, fixing some of the problems. The game officially had a full release half a year ago, and that "full release version" was missing half of the content and was riddled with a metric ton of game-breaking bugs. This should have been a massive red flag, but the developers have continued to work on the game, and now... now it's feels much more like a finished product.

Just keep in mind that progress is not that fast (e.g., main story took half a year to complete). You might want to wait a month or two to let them polish things a bit.

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 made an extensive guide via google sheets that is available in the guides section, covering almost all aspects of the game; please check that out if you are enjoying the game and looking for information to help you, and consider joining the very active discord community!
https://discord.onl/revolution-industry/
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3047604242

This has been my favorite game of the 'genre', among those of sailing naval combat games. Mainly that it is more focused on ship customization and combat than long-winded traveling for trade you would see in traditional sailing games. My biggest compliment though is definitely for the devs, that for their first game have delivered something really special as well as being a great group of people to engage with. They are very active on discord and receptive to the community feedback we have been giving them since before and after launch. Major bugs are getting stamped out quickly and many useful features and adjustments have been made based on feedback given without waiting weeks or months you might see from most other developers.

I see some worries of people occasionally that "this game should have been marked as early access". That being said, their reasoning makes sense, in that most of the game is already finished, and no major features are missing. The majority of the planned updates are for quality of life, balancing, and improvement of existing systems, capped off with finalizing story contents and the main story of the game. So it is fair to mention currently the planned story update is to be released in the time of Jan 2024, so the game is still not "complete". But the game is far from "early access" for the scope of what the devs had planned for the game, and is fully enjoyable as it is, if you don't mind waiting for the final story chapter. (There is still plenty of story currently.)

One thing to note that requires a lot of work if it isn't already planned for, after the first big chapter of the game characters do not have any voice acting anymore (at least in English). I am not sure if they are planning to add voice acting for the entirety of the story as there is quite a significant amount of dialog to add, but I hope it is something in the works. That being said you do at least get enough time hearing the main cast that you will certainly not forget their voices, and it does add a nice amount of flavor to the characters, which are far from shallow compared to similar games in the genre.

For those that read the first paragraph and wondered if that means the game is not fun outside of combat, there are definitely plenty of systems in the game for trading, freight and industry. Freight is by far the biggest source of income in the game and sees the player taking contracts to move bulk amounts of goods around the map, not having to worry about whether or not they will make a profit. Though trading isn't the biggest money source because of vendor limits, and industry needs a lot of QoL that is coming in the next update.