its chill at times, it can also be thrilling, it has a beautiful setting, i really like it :) a bit of porco rosso, mediterranian flair, a bit of crimson skies.. some light bussiness sim..

just all around a good time :)

First off, I gotta say that I appreciate the devs sticking with the tried-and-tested War Thunder control scheme. On top of that, it really has a lovely concept and art style.

AND NOW WE COME TO THE PROBLEMS. I think I'll just address things in the order I noticed them in-game. The plane has insane weight to it. I don't mean it's going to fall out of the sky at any moment, but rather the time it takes after a maneuver for the plane to stop drifting towards the direction it was going towards prior is insanely long. It makes harvesting fields, during which you will do many loops to turn around, extremely tedious, as over the length of three fields, your plane will still be pulling to the side. On top of that, this game features the biplane with the worst roll rate in the history of mankind. It genuinely makes it terrifying when at the end of an Immelmann, the assistant tries to correct your orientation; you will pull to the side massively, and it takes just way too long while you constantly lose altitude. (I speak of manually flying an Immelmann, not using that upgrade for it).

Now to the upgrades. A whole lot of the parts seem situational at best, maybe even just gimmicky. I would have preferred being able to fine-tune the performance of my plane more while being able to balance my cargo capacity more. Instead, I can get pontoons that will economically ruin me or wings that will cause harvesting wheat to damage my plane.

Decorating bottles. God, it really is an adorable detail. You create your own badge for the bottle, select a nice shape and everything. And I thought, great! This will define my products, and then I can produce them, and the bottle will always look like this - it'll be great! Well, sadly, after that editor, you will never see your bottle again. So it's just another gimmick at best to finish the production chain with that. And remaking your recipes from the Products list? That's currently broken. Speaking of broken, let's talk about the UI. From being able to softlock your game from changing the place you want to go to in your building while the fade-out after pressing exit plays, to the alcohol mixing process ending up in some weird unstable states that disable the use of the brewery. Polishing is badly needed.

The core gameplay loop, in my perception, is just way crappier with all these issues. If I wasn't wrestling with my plane while harvesting, and the brewery didn't softlock me about ten times in five hours, I am sure it could be a LOT MORE ENJOYABLE.

But in its current state? Damn. I want to love this game. I want to enjoy my time in it. But the flight model just needs some real tweaks, and the UI needs some polishing (and please fix the producing from the products list). Would I like more upgrades? Definitely. But I think there are way bigger issues than just a lack of content here and there. I wish I could recommend it, but I can't. I hope the devs read this and fix this game up ASAP - because I think this genuinely could be an absolute gem.

Too many flight games try to be a flight simulator. Too many flight games try to follow Ace Combat's formula. While I love both of these areas of the flight genre, not enough try to imagine the freedom of flight you'd find in a sim with the structure of a story driven game, with such easy and accessible controls.

Brew Barons delivers all of this with lovely visuals, a gorgeous soundtrack and BREWING. How often do you see flight games with a gameplay element that doesn't involve aviation?

I'd also like to add that all the Generative "AI" allegations are false with the exception of the voice-acting, which were sampled from volunteers who donated their voices. To me, this is acceptable, especially since you can mute the in game voices (I do this, as I find the voices to be uncomfortably uncanny.)

I highly recommend this very unique experience with gameplay elements that go largely unexplored in other flying games. Happy Brewing!

If Studio Ghibli remade Crimson Skies, it would be this game.

I like the concept, but the execution of core mechanics feel unfinished.

Flight is extremely slow, both in speed and maneuverability.
It feels like this was done to pad the size of the world.

Creating different brews is a good time- I especially like being able to put custom images on your bottles- but it feels completely pointless.
You can't do anything with them aside from putting them in your bar's stock and waiting.
I've supplied my bar much faster than anything sells, which has forced me into running side-missions and completing contracts for other bars- which show up at a snail's pace and aren't very rewarding.

The side missions are where I completely stopped playing a few minutes ago.
>Pick up a "paranormally sensitive" crewmate at a pub
>Take her to a "paranormal event" in the middle of the ocean
>It takes you into a "spirit world" where you slowly- SLOWLY- fly through a featureless landscape trying to hit spirits into "the light", in some terribly slow paced version of supernatural rocket-league.
This is where I jumped off the game for good.

I just can't, the game takes a great concept and makes it so empty and boring.
Most of the problems I have with the game could be fixed with updates, so we'll see where it goes, but we're not talking about an early-access release here, so I'm not going to hold my breath.

Porco Rosso, Last Exile and Valkyria Chronicles just had a baby.

And it's beautiful.

starts out nice, nice porco rosso vibe, gets tiresome and repetitive in the long run

It feels like each of the components of this game may have been play tested, but not the game as a whole. Open world games depend on meaningful reasons to explore, which is where Brew Barons is the most lacking. One would assume that collecting new recipes and materials to grow your brewing empire would be the reason to venture out into the world, but you will run out of reasons to brew almost immediately. You can fully stock your bar very quickly and contracts from other bars come in extremely slowly, and often require ingredients which I was unable to find even after exploring most of the map. The game is beautiful and it's clear that a huge amount of effort went into developing the game mechanics, so it's all the more glaring that so little attention was put towards the gameplay itself.

Biggest suggestions:
- Have the bars send you many more contracts with a wide variety of required ingredients, add other main objectives such as multistage quests that are not dependant on your characters
- Add more world minigames like the sunken wrecks, things for the player to do while moving between main objectives
- Make the range to identify world items and events much larger and keep them on your HUD much longer
- Incorporate combat with the pirates into the tutorial, or provide some sense of what the player can take of for combat
- There is no reason to be able to discover recipes with a single ingredient

Hopefully the devs flesh out the game parts of this game, but the amount of work that needs doing makes me feel that it will be a year or more before Brew Barons is actually in a state where it ticks the minimum requirements for an open world game.

The voice acting is nothing like the trailer and it's instead all AI generated. It's so flat and monotone that it kills any immersion that the terrible UI didn't already.

TLDR: Game is great if you can look past a few bugs and enjoy flying, pirates, alcohol, and want a flavorful, pretty, relaxing game. It's $20. They're improving it. I've spent more for less and been more disappointed (looking at you, KSP2). Just try it, I'f you don't like it, get your money back... but don't expect it to compete with a huge title.


For a $20 game this game is honestly great. Especially considering its from a 2-man dev team. Most of the negative reviews seem to be from people who were expecting something else and/or more and for $20 from a team over 4 years I don't know how you can expect much more than this. There's a lot of complaints about the AI voice "acting" but I don't find it to be an issue whatsoever. There has been a few instances I've encountered where it sounds a little janky or like the cadence is off but largely I don't find it to detract from the game play as a whole. Game play is a bit repetitive at times, especially when gathering materials to make a brew that fails, then fails again, and again... So you just go shoot a pirate down or go loot a shipwreck instead and come back to it...

The tutorials, especially the intro, could be improved to emphasize controls a bit more, as well as some more of the premise, money, upgrades, etc. It kind of touches on most of it but just glosses past a lot to emphasis the narrative. It took me some tweaking with settings and mapping to get something that works for me (i.e. autopilot tracking cursor is borderline unusable, especially with a controller and is enabled by default), and using a controller causes some menu's to break so I find myself using a mouse to correct it but these aren't that big of a deal overall, you can work around them, and are few and far between. There's ways it could be improved sure, but they seem to be adamant about working on the game and taking in feedback and applying it.

Considering the amount of bugs it has, I think releasing in early access would have been more appropriate but it has an early access price tag so no big deal... The art style is beautiful and it has a lot of potential in my opinion, especially if they keep working on it like they say they will. For $20, I think its a solid pick if you're a little patient and willing to work through little issues here and there which I'm confident will be rounded out in time. I was skeptical at first but now I love it. If you enjoy flying, pirates, and alcohol and want a relaxing game this is a solid pick IMO.