Airborne Kingdom is a resource gathering/exploration game with no combat, so Steam actually said You sure about this? It’s not like any of the games you usually buy. So I was all, Shut up, Steam! You’re not my mom! and bought it anyway. It reminds me of Stellaris, except that I could put it down after three hours and I don’t hate it*.
If you like building giant airships and cruising around the landscape peacefully unifying kingdoms using your awesome airship, then have at it.
Moe Lane
*I loathed Stellaris, and I couldn’t stop playing it. It was horrible. And I don’t mean, I played it a lot. I mean, I was playing it for sixteen hours a day. As I said, it was horrible.
Dear Lord, that sounds like the kind of curse you would get after stumbling into the wrong Pharoah’s tomb.
It’s like it seized hold of your “addiction to Civilization” bits and dug in harder but in a really unpleasant way.
I admit, I bounced off of Stellaris when I tried it on a free weekend. There were too many weird fiddly knobs right from the beginning, and trying to figure them all out in realtime while my optimization-seeking tendencies screamed at me just sounded super-unpleasant. I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it to the 15 minute mark. I felt a bit ashamed of my weakness at the time, but I think I’m glad about it now. Airborne Kingdom, though… that sounds potentially appealing. Depending on how it goes, I might share it with the wife, too.
I really enjoyed Stellaris on launch. Like you, sixteen hours of grind.
Then Paradox happened. Like all their games it bloated into a mass of fiddly-bits incomprehensible to all but the most hardcore micro-manager.
I saw it pop up when I logged into Steam yesterday, and I immediately wish-listed it before I read the reviews. By the time I finished, I thought it sounded a little dull (one reviewer described it as fetch quest / fed-ex quest stuff). I’ll give it a bit more time and look at the reviews again once they settle down.
Now Stellaris, OTOH… I’ve played that a lot. When I finally made the effort to understand the basics, I realized I could ignore the min-maxing fiddly bits and still enjoy the game. Once I got the basics down, I started adding fiddly bits.
The only game I managed a 16 hour session on was Civ 4, release day. A buddy brought his copy over after work, we got our PCs talking to each other, and then the next thing we knew, it was the next morning, well after sunrise.