Overthrown Review

Sandbox city builders are my go-to games when I want to destress and get creative. So, when developer Brimstone’s latest title, Overthrown, was announced to be leaving Early Access and also getting a console release, I had to give it a try!

Available for PC via Steam, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S, Overthrown is playable in both solo and co-operative play for up to six players! Although I was unable to access the multiplayer portion for this review, I was still looking forward to getting stuck in!

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a game of this type, there isn’t too much of a story. The basic premise is that you play as a monarch who has a crown with magical abilities. These allow you to run incredibly fast (even across water, which is fun!) and pick up basically anything not nailed down. So, it’s up to you to establish a kingdom, keep the citizens happy, and defend your realm at all costs!

Before being set loose in your sandbox world, there are a couple of options to choose from to customise your experience. You can select one of three difficulties, make the game single-player or open to friends, as well as choose from one of six maps. Of the worlds available, there is a small area, two are classed as medium, and the remaining three are large. Each of them are varied enough that players should explore them at least once, and even the smallest is a pretty decently sized area in which to grow your kingdom!

The difficulty options mainly relate to how aggressive enemies can be, with Peaceful making them unable to fight back. On the opposite end, Challenging (which is the default setting) will see mobs raid your settlements, attempt to steal your crown, and overall put up much more of a fight. That said, these can be customised to your liking mid-game, so if you want lots of enemies but need a little health boost, or disable their ability to steal your crown, then there are a number of options to play around with.

Artistically, Overthrown is a rather nice-looking game. The cute, cosy cube-based world is aesthetically pleasing, and the character designs (despite not being able to customise the protagonist) are quite charming. Whilst the player character and enemy animations look exaggerated and fluid, the same can’t be said about your townsfolk. These movements look stiff, whilst oftentimes you’ll see them simply standing idly by doing nothing… But we’ll touch on that shortly.

As for the audio, the soundtrack is mostly tranquil music that gets repetitive quickly. If anything, I found it similar to something you might hear in the overworld in Minecraft. Aside from that, there’s the sound effects you’ll hear from swinging your sword, lumber mill saws buzzing away, and so on. It’s inoffensive, but as a whole, the audio doesn’t do enough to make Overthrown stand out.

The performance, especially once your town starts expanding, can be very rough. Screen tearing was a regular issue no matter where I was, even if I had the game set to performance mode. It controls well enough, though, with no fiddly build menus or awkward movements, as crafting is tied to a radial menu, whereas menus for things like the research tree are navigated using a cursor. The UI does look rather basic, lacking any artistic charm seen in the actual game, but it does the job.

The main focus of Overthrown is to start populating a town, expand with different buildings, and fend off monster attacks. There’s very little in the way of tutorials, outside of a few pointers when starting a new game, so you’ll need to explore and learn the game as you play. I don’t hate this lack of handholding, but some instances of the UI not explaining what a certain number or icon means made it difficult to know what I should be focusing on next.

For the most part, you can set up a few production buildings that gather wood or food, then let the villagers take care of things whilst you go and explore or fight monsters. Except, these NPCs tend to not want to work. Earlier, I mentioned that these folk will stand around idling; well… this became a huge, game-breaking problem for me. Every so often, new villagers will join your settlement (you can thankfully adjust this limit or cap it so as not to have too many mouths to feed) and will be in need of work. Sometimes, if a job is available in one of your production buildings, they’ll trot off and get to work. Great! But that’s a rare occurrence. More often than not, they’ll stand around doing nothing, or even worse, if they already had a job, run in one place and basically be stuck in an infinite animation.

To remedy this, I gave Overthrown’s unique throwing mechanic a try. You can pick up pretty much anything, from buildings to people, and hurl them where you want. Throwing crops into a food production building will result in added resources relating to food, for example. Throwing your poor subjects into buildings should then automatically make them start working in that specific one. Except it doesn’t resolve the issue of some of them being stood idle or running on the spot. It doesn’t happen with every villager, but it makes it difficult to go and explore when there’s a chance production will grind to a complete halt because of this bug. Hopefully a patch will be released to sort this out; as for now, it genuinely ruins the game. You could always just pick up a building and run around absorbing the resources it needs, but that quickly becomes tedious (although it is funny to see).

When working as intended (I had to delete my save several times just to get through this review), then your means of production eventually expand as you research new items. From basic mining all the way to an airship, research is sort of like a skill tree, where you’ll need to have researched certain nodes in order to unlock more. It’s a good size too, with lots to unlock that all suitably help in turning your town from a small hamlet to, well… as big as you can make it! You’re never restricted to only building in one location so theoretically you could turn an entire island into one bustling city. Just with lots of people running on the spot or idling…

If there is an issue in your town, you’ll have a notification on the lower left of the screen until it's resolved. The first problem is that it doesn’t go into detail on what’s wrong or where/who exactly is causing it. Finding certain things is simple enough, but when you have a villager in danger because they’ve wandered off thanks to the terrible AI pathfinding, you better hope they show up on your compass, or they’re as good as dead!

Overthrown is a game I will absolutely keep my eye on in the hopes that it gets updated. As it stands right now, it feels like an unfinished, buggy mess that should have spent longer in Early Access. Being limited to exploration in case my villagers decide they want to go for a jog on the spot, thus ruining my resource intake, really does let the experience down. The ideas are all here; combat is simple yet frantic, the ability to pick up basically anything is both useful and lets you get inventive, and there’s a lovely, cartoonish charm to the visuals.