Play as a powerful monarch in possession of a soul-stealing crown and establish your kingdom in Overthrown, a casual city-building game.

Your main goal in Overthrown is to create your kingdom from scratch and keep its population happy, while also fighting against outlaws who want your powerful crown to themselves.

Overthrown‘s Steam Next Fest demo shows a lot of promise with its solid building system, fun combat, and surprisingly deep movement mechanics.

Possibly the most impressive part of Overthrown‘s demo is how good the main character feels to control. It’s common for movement and combat in survival crafting games to be clunky, but here the player is given a lot of fluid and fast mobility tools.

The player can run at insane speeds, charge up jumps, climb walls, use a shovel as a pogo stick, and toss entire buildings around on a whim. The game gives the player a great sense of freedom, as it seems to be entirely focused on being a sandbox that you can have fun in.

That said, there are dangers in Overthrown, as outlaws will try to raid your base every few days. Combat is not necessarily deep, but that seems to be intentional, as you are meant to create soldiers and set up watchtowers to deal with the bandits instead of fighting them yourself.

The demo that we got to experience during the Steam Next Fest is incredibly short, and only lets us play until the first bandit raid, which comes a little after unlocking major buildings like castle walls and gates.

It’s a unfortunate that there doesn’t seem to be enough time to build our castle during this demo, as the game’s building system is very fun. Just the fact that things work on a universal grid already gets rid of 90% of the issues that most survival crafting games have, and the way that materials and buildings interact with each other is pretty cohesive.

Overthrown is somewhat of an automation game, but without the part where you have to meticulously plan out your factory’s layout and build five structures to do one simple task. Most of the time you’ll just place a building down, which will generate resources, then place another building which will use those resources to create something or keep your population happy.

Building your city in Overthrown is painless thanks to the way things snap together, and there’s a good amount of tools that allow you to build your kingdom however you want. Buildings can be rotated or mirrored, and most structures fit very cleanly with each other, which is incredibly satisfying.

The game does have a few issues, though, especially when it comes to explaining some of its mechanics. Overthrown doesn’t really have any prompts aside from your basic controls, so things like placing blocks with the shovel or planting vegetables with the seed bag go unexplained, being found mostly by accident as the player tries everything they can to find interactions.

Overthrown also suffers from some slight performance issues, which at this point are expected from Early Access survival crafting games. The frame rate dips into slideshow territory whenever a new season starts, and the game is prone to stuttering whenever there’s a lot going on in your town.

Overall, Overthrown seems to be a solid survival crafting game, even if it’s going through some growing pains. There’s a great sense of freedom in how the game lets you zoom around at high speeds and toss buildings around, and its movement mechanics are a welcome surprise.

The demo currently available is disappointingly short, but does hint at a solid framework if the game gets more content. Overthrown seems to market itself as a co-op title, which is completely fine, but it can’t expect multiplayer hijinks to carry an entire experience if all that you are doing is expanding your town and fighting against raids every few days.

It’s possible that the game might hurt itself with its simplicity by being underwhelming or lackluster, but I am still cautiously excited for Overthrown‘s next demo or Early Access release, whatever come first. 

Overthrown is set to release at some point in 2024 for Microsoft Windows (through Steam Early Access).