Recent reviews by Draou

Utterly fantastic game for a low price of $15 if you are into the idea of 3D airship construction, of which it is the only true example on Steam. It is fully possible to spend most of your playtime in ship creation instead of playing the actual game.

For those of us with less interest in the aforementioned, this is a game best played with friends.

The tags on the store page are pretty much accurate. The graphics are, as you can see, barebones, but this does ensure anyone can run the game smoothly on practically any flavor of potato; chances are, if you can play the video on this page, you can run this game.

Onto the elephant in the room. This is an airship game. The airships are the star here. Although land and sea vehicles are buildable, you won't find the world map easy to traverse without the ability to fly. The game is called Airmen for a reason. Thankfully for those of us without an engineering degree, you don't have to build your own; there are plenty of pre-built ships available.

What ships you can use and create are tied by what parts you utilize and the resources they cost respectively. Unlocking new parts unlocks more ships, and allows us to create increasingly complex designs from a simple starting point. This is tied to an easy and comprehensive research tree that acts as the core progression of the game in-between your journeys into the Open World. Unlocking the parts via the aforementioned research tree and spawning in your ship all cost resources that you mine in the Open World game map on either PvE or PvP servers that you can swap between freely. Alternatively, you can take on job contracts from NPCs that provide both resource rewards and increasingly high influence over the world map if you are part of a faction.

While job contracts range from a variety of tasks you can probably guess (transporting cargo, killing ships, kidnapping ships, rescuing kidnapped ships after killing the kidnappers, etc.), the key here is that they provide a lucrative incentive to explore the map from place to place. Contracts always have a corresponding destination tied to them that is typically a fair ways off from where you've started, requiring us to take our airborne war crime over vast swathes of land, sea, and sometimesdemonicoceansoflava. You'll travel from blistering eye-searing deserts to remote freezing islands with winds so nasty your mechanical flappybird will start to rock, sway, and possibly flip over if you didn't stabilize it enough. Thankfully, there is a silver lining as far as our survival goes: we are robots.

You play as a robot in this game, if you didn't take that literally. While being a terminator-lite comes with the perk of not having to eat, sleep, or feel whiplash, you will find the world more than hostile enough for this to be an afterthought. The catch here is that everything in this world is also a robot, and that means absolutely everything; people, birds, fish, giant sharks, (flying) whales, (flying) giant sharks, etc.. These are the denizens you'll probably find wandering out in the open, with especially rare creatures acting as unique bosses you can find hidden throughout the world or spawned in during in-game events. As a general rule of thumb for your survival- do NOT hit random ominous objects that look distinctly out of place unless you are readily prepared for a fight. Or do. Fun things can happen. Speaking of fun things, there are wrist-mounted grapple hooks in this game.

Grapple hooks are deeply essential to everything you do in Airmen. To summarize- they are your lifeline. Anytime you want to get to the nooks and crannies of your ship quickly, board another ship, or hail-mary your way back onboard after falling off- you'll need one of these. Always have one equipped. As an added side-tip, you can use them to pick up cargo far more quickly than you would by hand. Grapple hook is love. Grapple hook is life.

On a similar note, non-airship combat in this game is going to feel very stiff. You are a robot. You do not flinch. At worst you crack open, and that's visually unpleasant in it's own way; still, you won't feel like a human being when you empty the magazine of a braced carbine rifle into a stowaway player with perfect accuracy, then proceed to reload it smoother than Gaben's fingers slipping into wallets during a Steam Sale. Crave the strength and certainty of steel, and take advantage of your lack of fleshy parts to perform mobile stunts with your grapple hook to get an edge over others who may have the audacity to play this like a traditional FPS. In all seriousness, this will not feel like Call of Duty. Just Remember: Regardless of whether or not you are flying an airship or boarding one, movement is king.

Ideally, when playing with friends (the best way to play), assign roles to each person beforehand so they have something to focus on. You will need a pilot for the ship, for starters; larger ships will often require dedicated gunners who utilize manual turrets or even gunnery stations attached to massive gun batteries too unwieldy for the pilot to control from the steering wheel while they're busy flying your rust bucket; above all else, the survivability of any crew is multiplied many times over by a dedicated engineer who works to keep everything repaired (this is also the person who gets yelled at the most, fair warning). As an added bonus, especially when you feel as if your vessel is losing the battle, consider closing in and using your grapple hooks to board the enemy vessel in order to tear it apart, along with its crew, of course; bonus points if you scream corny one-liners over sea shanty music as you plummet towards the enemy airship with nothing but a grapple hook and a handaxe.

Beware of pigeons. Good Luck.

If you're looking for a modernized FTL-style game with pretty graphics, you got it here.

The game is excellent. So excellent I got it again on this account to enjoy it while I travel.

The long version is that this is at first a much more difficult game than FTL to get "good" at. There's more to manage in both food (upgrading your oxygen early on can remove this concern almost immediately in the early game) and ship mechanics (you will want to upgrade your storage eventually- just not right away), although it isn't a massive jump from FTL.
Basically, if you've played FTL, you can treat this like a spiritual successor.

It also has endless modes (and more than one way to do this!) without any modding required, which is a massive plus.

Progression between runs has expanded from the FTL-standard of ship unlocks being the main focus. Now, there's lasers, launchers, ammunition for your launchers, plasma weapons, EMP, etc.- All stuff you'll quickly get familiar with and all stuff you'll have *mostly unlocked by the time you finish the first couple campaigns (there are a good amount, each with a loose story to follow. Don't expect much here beyond some light flavor and funny lore), so don't worry about having to grind forever to get everything setup for the perfect run. Ships, on the other hand, will take a very long time to unlock; mainly because this game is far larger than FTL in terms of the scale of each of your runs, and how much you are expected to do in them (thankfully the starting ship built with the human campaign in mind is pleasing to look at and reliable).

On that note, there are a few problems with the game that go beyond what most would likely consider up to preference. It isn't all sunshine and rainbows, even if the experience is overall a good one. Thankfully, the vast majority of these hiccups are avoidable once you experience them and know what to look out for in future runs. These will range from a few sketchy events that may seem particularly unfair under the right (in this case, wrong) circumstances (you'll get a feel for these ones, even with how varied they can be; as a rule of thumb, never send a non-specialized crew member onto an unknown and unscanned vessel- unless you love Aliens), all the way to fights that seem jarringly unfair for the state of your ship in your run (if you find the progression difficult, build up your strength loitering in the starting regions of space, hunting down your pursuers and other pirates repeatedly until you have enough scrap saved up to confidently upgrade yourself. Chances are, you will have a far less difficult time fighting the rising bounty on your head than the later sectors of the game, so don't feel rushed to move on just because the BIG RED METER is getting higher- it's not so bad until much later).

Pro Gamer Moves:

• Play like Ron Swanson: Much oxygen upgrade. Such plantation. Many burger.
  
• Don't question intergalactic space diet, or how your entire crew shills for McdonaldsTM: Is the almighty burger economy is getting too hard for your on-board plantations to handle? You can hire space elves, or, preferably, robots (they eat less at dinner).
  
• Speak softly: Solve your events practically. Good will is a myth. Religion is a joke. If you see a giant floating dead hunk of metal in space, you probably want to harvest the ♥♥♥♥ out of it from a distance. Whatever you do, DO NOT send untrained crew members in to take a look past the nice, protective walls of your ship, no matter how much the other side of comms begs you for help (if you'd like to hug an Alien, ignore this terrible advice and go right ahead).
  
• Carry many big sticks: Bigger ships with bigger guns tearing open new doors faster than you can likewise? Get another gun. And if that don't work, get more gun.

The short and sweet is that this is amazing.
Damn thing subtly hooks its talons into your memory as you absorb various little details as you go along.
They always come up sooner or later, letting you remind yourself of something as their effects grow, and you smoothly put the pieces together.
Characters develop organically as you get obsessively attached to them as they grow up. There's never an assurance of what will happen next, and the story does well to remind you of this through each character's own unique reactions, built off a customizable personality.
The comedy is playful and often places you at an audience perspective as you watch characters poke fun at each other, in their own ways. All to keep up their shared motivation to keep going as they slowly realize that some of them won't make it out alive.
There is a deep respect for how death is handled. It also hurts, a lot.
A heavy string soundtrack that's incredibly well placed dips in and out as appropriate throughout the game.
This is the first game that has made me pause to reflect and tear up over a collection of digital events. All part of a delightfully imaginary story that never plays out the same way.
Whoever made this poured a lot of love into how it all binds together. It really shows.
An all time favorite of mine at this point. I'll be playing it for a long time.