I bought it cause I'm sucker for flying island settings and Netstorm was one of my favourite games. This is a very slow game, more like Europa Universalis than Netstorm, and I stopped playing because it bored me. Probably will get back to it at some point when I have lots of time.
So far my impressions:
- I played the first 3 campaign missions on the hard difficulty, and at no point I was forced to do something or I will lose, I just maxed out on economy with no pressure from the enemy then I did mission objectives, it was boring
- maybe it was a campaign/tutorial and that's why it was so easy and slow, but they should mark it clearly and allow to skip it if that was the case
- the game seems to be plot-heavy, but the plot is presented in a small text window in the bottom right corner while the game is going on, it makes it easy to misunderstand who is talking to who or to miss some dialogs/mission objectives altogether
- the economy is about building enough houses to have workers that give gold, and enough farms to feed the workers, there's several other resources and you have to scan for minerals, but it's not very important, your bottleneck is usually gold and food
- mana is the dump resource
- there are heroes units requiring micromanagement, the interface to control them seems weird, it's frustrating to use (you put flags marking where they need to do something and wait for them to get to it eventually), maybe I haven't gotten used to it yet
+ the mechanic with joining together islands is interesting and would allow innovative gameplay (if the enemies forced you to make hard choices)
+ the diplomacy is very simplistic (or maybe I haven'g gotten to the interesting bits yet)
Overall the setting seems interesting, some mechanics are nice, the graphics is nice, but the game feels very slow and boring.