Airship: Kingdoms Adrift Bewertungen

Eigentlich ganz cooles Konzept, hat auch einige Stunden echt Spaß gemacht. Wird aber relativ schnell langweilig, da die Story auch eher flach ist.

It's a bit of a mixed bag but the game is really strong where it matters. It has obvious weaknesses but they're not deal breaker for me and the core gameplay carries it through. It's not a game for everyone but it's decent for its genre. Let's go about the weaknesses first. The menus in city hubs are seriously cluttered and convoluted. The UI uses three sub-menus where it should really only need one. It's manageable after a few hours but never stops slowing you down or slowly grinding at your sanity. At least visually the menus look quite good but oh boy, there are a lot of them. The second weakness is the very inconsistent production quality of character portraits and voice lines. There are a lot of voiced dialogs (which is great) but some of the earlier ones are just incredibly cheesy. The tutorial villain is incrediby bad and honestly needs a redo. Some of the officer portraits are also really low resolution, while others range from adequate to good. Many NPC portraits are also rather lifeless. The anime style is a bit overdone here and there. What it boils down to is a generally conflicted art direction. Some of it is great but much of it clashes to some degree. It makes the game look cheap when there's actually a lot of strong foundation behind the inconsistent presentation. Lastly, the games visuals aren't exactly impressive. The lack of weather and environment effects are definitely holding the atmopshere back and the ship+terrain textures could also do with a few more pixels - or anytihng to hide the blurriness really. It's hard to ignore this stuff but I wouldn't say it's a major issue either. Onto the strengths! The ship combat works really well and allows for quite a few gameplay styles. Next to combat there's also a pretty decent trading and city expansion system. The upgrade spiral is executed really well and ties into the exploration. New citys often have different modules, ressources and ships for sale, which often ties into previous areas. Upgrades and sidegrades generally feel meaningful, while weapons are varied and punchy. There's always an idea to try out, something to optimize or a new place to go. The world feels fairly alive with NPC's and quests at every corner. And that's why the game earns it's thumbs up for me, despite the rough presentation. Even if the devs never adress the portraits, the dated visuals or the messy city UI, it's still an engaging game.