RPG City-Builder 'Airborne Empire' is Out in Early Access! We Tested it on the Steam Deck

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A copy of Airborne Empire was provided to us by the developer/publisher for this article.

RPG and City-Builder might not be the first two genres you think about matching together, but Airborne Empire by The Wandering Band has just been released on Steam, and it aims to blend these 2 genres to create a new and unique experience.

Airborne Empire - Gameplay Impressions

Airborne Empire places you in command of a large airship, although it's more like a giant platform with propellers attached rather than your usual airship.

While the game sells itself as a mix of RPG and City-Builder, it certainly leans more into the city-builder aspect than RPG. You'll be constructing pathways, researching, and building new facilities on your airship, all while balancing the design so that your airship doesn't become overly burdened on one side. You'll also need to harvest resources from the ground below using your airship's population.

I feel like the game would be better categorized as an RTS Colony Sim, as there are elements of combat in the game that require you to build defensive structures to protect against raids, and the game isn't quite on the scale of your regular "city-builder" like SimCity or Cities Skylines. Your colony size will be in the tens at first, before reaching the hundreds later on in the game.

You are able to contact settlements down below, allowing you to recruit more citizens to your airship, giving you more workers to construct buildings and gather resources. The interaction with the cities is perhaps the most "RPG" part of the game, where you are given quests, such as supplying the cities with certain resources.

There isn't really a plotline per se. The lore of the game is supposed to be that civilized people exist only on the ground, as pirates have taken over the air, meaning you are in a unique position in your airship to take back control of the skies. But it's not expanded upon too much, and the game is generally more about creating your own airship and seeing what you can do with it.

Airborne Empire - Steam Deck Performance Tested

Airborne Empire is frustratingly high on requirements it seems. Even on the lowest graphical settings, it's impossible to maintain 30 FPS on the Steam Deck, with frequent stutters and slowdown for seemingly little reason. Applying an FPS Limit in SteamOS also causes strange behavior, causing a deterioration in performance far below the specified FPS Limit.

The game does support the Steam Deck's native 1280x800 resolution, eliminating any black bars, but does not have controller support, so you'll need to rely on a controller layout for this one. The default WASD Keyboard + Mouse layout works quite well, but you might want to add a few tweaks for things like adjusting game speed, although you can adjust it with just the mouse cursor.

Here are the settings I used for the game, basically the lowest you can set the game to:

The game still looks decent, with lighting and some shading, although we are forfeiting shadows and any cloud effects here. Likely the CPU will become the main issue later on in the game as you get a larger airship with more workers and buildings, so it's a good idea to reduce as much strain on the GPU as possible so the Steam Deck can divert power to the CPU.

Power draw is pretty intensive in the game, as we can't really apply a frame rate lock without severe performance issues, the game is almost always running flat out, meaning my Steam Deck OLED reported between 19-21W battery drain the entire time. So expect no more than 2.5 hours of battery from an OLED model, and you'd be lucky to get 90 minutes of playtime on a Steam Deck LCD.

The text is also a little small and difficult to read in places, such as the resources along the top of the screen, an HUD scaling option wouldn't go amiss here.

Is Airborne Empire playable on the Steam Deck? That might depend on who you ask. The game frequently dips below 30 FPS, often running in the mid-20s, even in the early game. If you can tolerate a 20-25 FPS experience in an RTS as you head towards the late game, then you might consider the game playable on Steam Deck, otherwise, it might be best to give this one a miss.

Conclusion

Airborne Empire is a solid title, the mix of colony sim with quests is a unique one, and I enjoyed designing my airship and piloting it across this interesting world. Unfortunately, the lack of controller support, and more importantly, some pretty poor performance, means that I wouldn't really recommend that you play this one on the Steam Deck, although it may well be worth a try on a more powerful device if you're into this kind of game.

The game is available now on Steam for $29.99, although it is available at 10% off until January 27th.

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