Grade: A-
A military strategy steampunk sandbox with infinite depths.
Airships: Conquer the Skies is a sandbox game where you can create airships and steampunk machines and then utilize them in either campaigns or one-off battles. Your vantage point for these epic battles is a 2d side-scrolling map. Digging into military strategy and engineering details will serve a player well in this game.
Build your own ships, tanks, and ground defenses
Airships: Conquer the Skies is a game where you always feel like you’re scratching the surface. As you go through the tutorial, there are walls of text, and you realize you are dealing with an incredibly detailed, in-depth set of sandbox mechanics. Your airships are floated by Suspendium and powered by coal. Then, you need a bridge, crew quarters, and propellor to get your airship to start to fly.
After you get the basics, you can add weapons, which have a massive variety of designs. There are rockets, cannons, battering rams, saws, grappling hooks for marine boarding crews, and much more. Also, you have different armor types to consider, which add protection, but also weight. Weight lowers your highest altitude (service ceiling). To top it off, you’ll find a complete set of decorations to customize your ship and give it personality. With each airship, you balance out the weight, lift, speed, and weapons to give yourself an edge. I imagine Airships is a dream game for an engineer!
To take the complexity and ramp it up one step further, Airships also allows you to design land craft (I.E., tanks) and your ground defenses. Not only are you fighting the battle in the skies, but you are also fighting it on the ground as well. Whoa!
Try out campaign mode
After understanding the gist of the ship design phase from the tutorial, you can start a conquest campaign. You’ll see an overland map and find yourself embroiled in not just ship design but a resource management challenge and battling it out with other countries. You have to manage money, tech upgrades, and airship building all at once. In my first campaign, I was wiped out quickly by a country with airships with giant saws on the front. Not fair!
After a few more campaign attempts, you will likely start to understand the flow a bit better. My furthest campaign had me conquer a considerable chunk of the map, but I failed to focus on tech upgrades as much as I should. Even while I had a good-sized armada, they were all wooden-armored ships. On the opposing side, my enemy had fully steel-plated airships with colossal rocket launchers. I was quickly wiped out, even after trying to use all the anti-A.I. tricks I could brainstorm.
At this point, I was ready to put the game down. It seemed that to win, you needed to invest heavily in micromanaging your ship and defense builds and do creative tricks to gain an edge over the A.I.
If you do get past the A.I. or want to play a more dynamic opponent, the next step is to take your game online and play against human opponents. There is an active community supporting the Airships game, including a multi-thousand-member discord server. Here, you will easily be able to find folks for a multiplayer session. I would imagine that playing against a person would be a lot more enjoyable than the A.I.
Create epic battles in sandbox
After I was campaigned out and the game spent a few days on the shelf, my son picked up Airships. He was more interested in the sandbox portion than the campaign and had an absolute blast designing epic battle encounters. He built piles of custom ships, defenses, and tanks and played out the battles on screen. His enjoyment level was a 10/10. Seeing the game through his eyes gave me a better perspective. I think he was playing the game to its full strengths.
Overall, I could tell that Airships was a labor of love for its creator. The game has an incredible amount of surprising and exciting details incorporated. I’ll never forget my first time not just fighting another airship but facing off against a Kraken that had come unto my land.
While the campaign mode tired me out, the sandbox pulled me right back in. If you have only a couple of hours or a few hundred hours, Airships is a great game to pick up and play.
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