Overthrown is pitched as a chaotic city-builder. Like a Minecraft mash-up with Kingdom Two Crowns, the player must explore the world and collect resources to build and develop their kingdom, all whilst protecting their home from those who want to destroy it and steal the crown. Despite this simple pitch, Overthrown is much more than just a city-builder; it’s also an exploration game, a combat game, a defence game and a survival game. As you’d expect, this is a lot of genre parts to stitch together, and the resulting product is a bit of a Franken-game. Some sections fuse together nicely, where others stick out like an oversized wolf-arm stitched onto a schoolgirl. On the plus side, the variety of gameplay elements fully fleshes out the bones of the game – unlike my Frankenstein’s monster metaphor which has definitely been stretched too thin now.
Throughout Overthrown, the player researches new innovations to unlock new structures, buildings and features for the kingdom – of which there are multitudes! The city-builder elements to the game are well stacked with options and the possibilities are endless. Even the landscapes can be adapted block by block to suit the player’s needs. This is a great chance to get creative, play around and make a unique and distinctive kingdom.
On the downside, the actual gameplay in Overthrown can be a little fussy and frustrating. A few quality-of-life features fall short, leaving you feeling obstructed and exasperated. As you progress through the research tree to unlock new village structures, the selection wheel in build mode becomes overwhelmingly crowded and tricky to use. Moreover, the game doesn’t keep a tally of which buildings you’ve constructed or how many. Because of this – and the sheer quantity of buildings available – it’s easy to lose track of what they’ve recently unlocked and whether they’ve already constructed it.
Further to this, Overthrown provides next to no tutorials. Although this might be expected – or even enjoyable – for players who love the exploration and creative side of the game, the lack of guidance can make the town-builder elements of the gameplay cryptic and confusing. There’s little to no detail given on how the buildings, world elements and villagers interact, and inadequate time given to the player to experiment and work it out. The resources you need to unlock a building or make it function are shown to you as miniscule indefinable icons. Is that a flame? A sack? A piece of fluff? Oh no, that’s not a resource icon at all, it’s just a mark on my screen. As the in-game days tick by, the player is bombarded with urgent but bewildering messages on everything that’s going wrong with the village but with no explanation as to how to resolve it. Chaotic is certainly an apt description.
The wider world itself is enjoyable to explore; skim across the surface of a lake at top speed, pit beasts against outlaws to eliminate all your foes in one fell swoop, harvest stacks of resources all at once by dashing right through them. It’s a shame then, that the map features are so restrictive. Primarily, it’s impossible to tell which way your character is facing on the map. There was more than one occasion where I found myself speeding off into the wilderness, only to realise I’d gone completely the wrong way. What’s more, the aforementioned miniscule indefinable resource icons only appear in the area surrounding your character. Perhaps there’s more of what you need on the other side of the kingdom? Who knows! You’ll have to make your way over there and keep checking your map every few seconds to see if what you need turns up. That’s if you can tell which icon is which.
All in all, Overthrown has the potential to have a little bit of something for everyone. Perhaps with a few more improvements now that it’s reached a 1.0 release, and a jolt or two from an electrode – sorry, there’s that Frankenstein metaphor again – it could fulfil that potential.
