The Wandering Band followed up Airborne Kingdom with a bigger, combat-equipped sequel, and a chunk of the original fanbase wanted the sequel to stay peaceful instead.
Official art · via Steam
Airborne Empire hands you a flying city, a scattered set of ground kingdoms below it, and the job of keeping the whole contraption in the air while pirates take shots at your hull. The Wandering Band built this as a direct follow-up to Airborne Kingdom, and the pitch, a literal city you pilot across five biomes, is still one of the freshest hooks a builder game has pulled off in years.
The core fantasy delivers. Balancing lift, propulsion, and counterweight while your city grows outward is a satisfying puzzle, and the art direction and writing carry a sense of place that most builders don't bother earning. Quality-of-life touches like pause-and-rebuild and a toggle for cloud transparency show a studio that's been listening to its own players, and peaceful exploration between objectives is still the game's best mode even now that combat exists.
Combat is the fault line running through this entire release, and it split the community before launch even happened: a loud share of returning players wanted the original's stress-free tone preserved, not a mandatory raid mechanic bolted onto it. Mixing a city builder with RPG combat systems dilutes both halves rather than strengthening either, and raid repairs interrupt the relaxed pacing that used to be the whole point. Performance hasn't helped the argument: frame drops show up even on strong hardware, and Steam Deck players are stuck around twenty to thirty frames a second with no native controller support and text too small to read comfortably.
Steam's overall score sits at eighty-six percent, still comfortably positive, but the last thirty days have cooled to seventy-five, and that gap is the story here. The Wandering Band built something worth building on top of. Whether they smooth out the fights or double down on them will decide if that gap closes or widens.