Happy new year! It's time for our first review of 2025! I was genuinely curious about Overthrown when I saw it on Gamepass. It is in early access which the developers let you know right away warning about unfinished things and possible game crashes. I decided to check it out and see what this kingdom building game was like.
I find it odd that the game just kind of throws you in with no explanation or story of why you're going to build a whole kingdom. I do like that you can adjust the difficulty in the game settings before you start your world. You also have the option to play co-op with up to five other players if you want. You play as a Queen and you have a crown that you can use to heal yourself and gives you overpowered physical abilities. You can start by changing your look by choosing the outfit in the user interface menu. Depending on what color you pick it changes the color of the queen's hair and outfit.
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| Starting my kingdom. |
Overthrown has a kind of bare bones tutorial for building. The first thing you have to do is build your town hall of course and then you have to build a few lumber mills which the new villagers will assign themselves to when they show up. That was another interesting I noticed. When you build more things like a bakery or a food kitchen, the villagers will volunteer themselves for the various jobs. You don't have to worry about building tools to chop down the trees. The queen is so comically strong, she can punch trees, lift them up, and throw them in the lumber mills. I was amused by this aspect of the game. Don't like where a building is? You can pick it up and throw it where you want it to be. You can also pick up all the people and throw them. That seems to be a funny thing you can do that makes me think of cartoons with slapstick humor.
If you want to unlock more things, you have to do research. As long as you have the correct amount of resources, you can research things like farming which will unlock access to other things like orchards or metalworking unlocks access to making weapons for the village. Since it's in early access some research items aren't available yet, but let you know when those updates will be happening which is nice.
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| Doing some research. |
One thing that I'm not really thrilled with in Overthrown is the bandit invasions. With the kingdom building comes having to prepare for bandits coming in trying to destroy and steal everything you have built. The Queen does have weapons of her own. You can either punch bandits with your bare fists or switch to your choice of swords. Combat isn't too overwhelming and you can dodge and dash around taking out the bandits easily. You can zoom the map out and take a look at where the bandit camps are so you can preemptively take them out. If the bandits take you out, you respawn, but without your crown. You have to find the bandit that stole your crown which is marked on your map and defeat them to get your crown back. If you don't get your crown back the villagers lose hope and their morale drops. This is yet another thing the game doesn't explain very well, but I was able to figure it out pretty quickly.
Frankly dealing with the bandits was my least favorite part of the game. There's a timer telling you how many days you have to prepare for the next wave of bandit attacks. I feel that it detracted from the relaxed cozy building aspects of the game and it gets frustrating pretty quick having to constantly repair buildings that got damaged in the bandit attacks. I really wished for a way to turn it off so I could just build and farm in peace.
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| Taking out all the bandits. |
I loved the farming and I feel that is something that Overthrown definitely got right. You can forage for items and with a lot of the plants those drop seeds you can plant in your fields. There are also fruit trees you can plant making your own orchards. Harvesting is easy because again, you can just spin using your sword to cut through all the crops. The game does a good job of letting you know what crops grow in what seasons. It was fun to see giant pumpkins and tomatoes, then getting to harvest all of them. Building storage for them was easily done and constantly farming helps provide food for your growing kingdom.
There were tons of game crashes, but it was usually after a couple of hours of gameplay. It caused me to save often so I wouldn't lose progress with my building. With it being in early access that is to be expected, but sometimes it would crash in the worst moments and there are issues with the loading times being a bit long in places. There are also a few weird world clipping glitches with the ground missing in some places or in one case a villager's face was missing and it was just a blank face. Overthrown isn't a bad game, but it definitely needs some more polish and work on those issues in early access. The potential for it to be a solid game is there so hopefully they get it sorted and it can truly shine for us lovers of cozy building and farm sim games.
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| Giant pumpkins! |
*Overthrown is in early access on the following platforms: Steam, Xbox Series X/S, and Playstation 5
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