Airship: Kingdoms Adrift Reviews

"Uncharted Waters" sky version

Pretty great game, trying to learn the Officer and Trade routes

I really wanted to like this one, and did end up spending a lot of time with it, but ultimately it's just filled with frustration. The main point of Grief here is the trading system. There are a ton of options available to you, but the UI is very bad and difficult to learn. Once you do learn it, you find that you need to navigate between many different screens to set anything up. For example, to automate a freight shipment, you need to navigate to the relevant city, navigate to the relevant shop, set up a recurring buy order, exit out of all of that, go to the fleet management screen, find the ship docked at the relevant city (which doesn't have a sort or search function), and set up the freight route by selecting the cargo to ship to the destination city. If you misclick the search bar (when it is there for a given function) and start typing, you will hotkey yourself to some other screen and need to repeat the process. Things randomly go wrong with the buy process. Sometimes instead of going into the city warehouse, goods will go into the hold of a ship stationed at the city. The option to directly transfer from the ship's hold to the warehouse is disabled unless you're docked at the city, which is really strange because almost everything else I've described can be managed remotely. The breaking point happened when all my auto-buy orders just stopped working. Cities have goods in them, the little autobuy icon was present, and if I went in and redid the buy order it would start working again, but what's the point if I have to go in and do it manually again? This makes my entire money making supply chain grind to a halt, and turns the endgame into an unfun grind. Also the twist at the end is stupid.

Very elaborate cash grab. There's a lot of voice acting in the first mission then it noticeably just stops. The Production/Trade machines aren't well explained nor do they function well. The world is stagnant no matter what you do. Good concepts but its execution leaves it as the typical sandbox pirate game.

Pretty solid game, I wasn't sure what to expect but I wanted to see how they did ship combat. The game opens and is pretty lore heavy which I thought was cool. You can tell the devs really put a lot of love into it. The mechanics are simple but there's a good amount of complexity and room for strategy with the ship customization. I'm having a good time with it.

Interesting ship building system, engaging ship combat. If you wanted a game that was like SM Pirates. This is better.

So let me start by saying at the time of review I haven't completed the main story (Playing on Kingdoms Adrift Difficulty) in chapter 9, but I feel that I have a pretty good grasp on the game at 83 hours in. The game is okay with moments of it being good. TLDR: 6/10 Wait for it to go on sale. Starting off with what it does well. It scratches that itch of fleet management where you are constantly managing resources to try and make money and upgrade your fleet. You have a fairly wide selection to pick from when it comes to the Airships you want to use in the early to mid game. You are able to go off the rails and do kind of whatever you want to a degree, be a pirate, a merchant, or something in the middle. Only being limited when you must progress the story to unlock new and better upgrades or exclusive shops and crew members. The art style of the ships is great. Now onto some of the downsides: Rename this game to Airship: Eternity Adrift because everything takes forever. Everything in this game takes just a bit too long to do. I played the game almost exclusively on its 10x speed and even then some of the travel time or waiting for ships to be built takes forever. This is mostly an issue on Kingdoms Adrift Difficulty at least, you can pretty much say good bye to capturing ships outside of forcing a fleet 1/3 of your fleet power to surrender so you won't be capturing any big ships. Combat is okay until you realize that you are really just stat checking your opponents in the late game, this leads to the combat late game starting to feel tedious adding to that earlier feeling of everything taking just a bit too long. Because fleets are just stat checking in the late game all you want are the biggest ships to get through the end game. Most of the automated trade systems you can set up to run in the background aren't very intuitive and you largely just ignore it witch is a shame because it seems rather interesting. Once you get a new ship your old ones kind of just sit and gather dust in your hangers. The art style of some of the characters is a bit off putting at times. Also the frame rate gets pretty bad with the bigger ships in the late game. Things I would hope to see in the future would be making the set up of automated trade a bit easier. More late game ships to spice up the variety of your fleet/ let us have more than 3 ships in a fleet. Maybe add perks to running different fleet styles/ ships. Overall I would rate this game a 6/10 at the moment, its good but needs some more loving with updates. Recommend waiting for a sale if you really want to pick it up.

ship combat is interesting but incentivizes a bullrush sort of strategy. Closer fights will require better positioning. can be a bit of a grind buying/selling at times to fully upgrade or buy new ships but that is kind of the point and makes it interesting making money. the story is mostly just text boxes and is very dry. I had to skip it all after a certain point. Same for the NPC quests. Some NPC quests are somewhat interesting. The game carries an almost soap style feel with alot of the game being revolved around these dialogues that occur as you travel back and forth through the world talking to quest NPCs. character abilities were confusing on when they were active/activated? locations around the world were somewhat interesting, but no much/if any real random encounters or any kind of events in them, other than story driven stops to visit and chat with a npc. this basically made locations only importance is what resources/factories were available there, and what the buy/sell was. freight features are cool, but menu navigation can be clunky and confusing but once you figure it out pretty handy. the overall difficulty of the game is fairly easy. Most challenge is from beter ships.

Can I recommend this game as it is now? no. This game is lacking in content, the story is boring and filled with repetive fetch quests, and the whole game just has repetitive gameplay that gets old fast. The ship building is okay, but quickly you'll notice how little options there really are as all the weapons are just reskins of one another, and the "better" armors for your ship only ever does a slightly better job at preventing immediate damage as the weakest armor in the game. Your ships will be either designed for cargo for trading (meaning weak and you shouldn't fight), or weapons and armor (no cargo space for any meaningful attempts for trade). Now you can build better upgrades, weapons, and systems for you ship, and can also commission ship yards to build you better ships. HOWEVER you have to advance the story first, then you have to buy business license, which you can only get from ONE city, which allow you to build a warehouse to store the parts you'll need, then you have to upgrade your manufacturing areas to use the blueprints to make whatever it is you're trying to make, adn from there you have to travel the map using an unintuitive "market" menu to see where shit is which is ALWAYS on the other side of the map and costs a small FORTUNE> So enjoy the fucking grind for ONE gun. God help you if you try to build a SHIP. Now the ships all look amazing, but the game does a SHIT job at explaining how to get the better ships. HOWEVER every ship is fucking TINY and only has one deck where you have to fit everything. But you'll either be building cargo ships to transport everything, or you'll be building a warship. I'd say build the warships, as every three fucking seconds you are going to be HOUNDED by hostile fleets! The in game priate factions will send larger and large fleets at you the more of their "icons" you collet from beating them. Does the game explain how this works? NOPE! So have fun getting attack by a fleet of battlecruisers while you have an uparmored cargo freighter. Even government fleets will attack you if you get to close. Does the game explain that or even warn you? Nope! But it also doesn't matter at ALL if you commit crimes as the bounty against you does NOTHING. The only way to get larger fleets to leave you alone is to immediately parley using Jean's ability, paying off your attackers, and losing one of the previously mentioned "icons" associated to the faction you're surrendering to. Speaking of Jean. He's the first character you meet in the game and you're stuck with him, and eventually Minerva, FOREVER. All of the ship "captains" you meet are all about as three dimensional as a sheet of paper. Their stories are either ONLY fetch quests, or ONLY scripted battles, with the exception being the first Gunner you get, which has BOTH! The system to assign your captains is poorly designed, as you can only assign captains by going to a port town that has a Ship Fitter (its where you install parts) and then clicking on the Captain portraits slots below your ships diagram and then picking the Captain that fills that role of either Captain, Navigator, Gunner, Engineer, and Quartermaster. As every captain only fills ONE role. Then to upgrade your leaders you have to beat an ever increasing number of fleets, not ships, WHOLE FLEETS. One enemy ship? thats one fleet. Three enemy ships? Thats ONE FLEET. And the required number of fleets to beat increases by a factor of 5 for each level the Captain has. Now the VIPs upgrade immediately after you beat the required number of fleets. The other "recruited" captains require resources to upgrade! Which is REALLY fucking annoying when your Captain needs beer to upgrade, but beer can only be purchased from the Black Market in one of two towns on opposite sides of the map! Why is BEER a Black Market commodity? WHO THE HELL KNOWS! Nothing in the game is illegal to transport, so GOD ABOVE knows why there are even black markets in the game to begin with! To cut all of this short, as I could go on and on and talk about how the voice acting stops after the first act because there IS no voice acting after the first act, or I could talk about how cluttered the games HUD gets with repeatable "procurement" quests popping up, etc. or I could talk about how lazy it is that every shop keep is just a randomly generated Frankenstein of the same three of four predesigned body parts... sorry, i got side tracked... where was I? OH YES! Don't buy this game. Its bare bones at best, with a poorly explained world and story, with shallow boring characters, crappy ship design, TERRIBLY implemented systems and mechanics, and just BORING gameplay. Keep an eye on the game, maybe the devs will get their shit together and work out the issues, maybe they'll finally add more voice acting to the game, who knows. As it stands, don't get this game.