For such a small game, Overthrown has surprisingly big ambitions. At first glance at the Steam page, the gameplay looked kind of choppy for a game that has been in development since July 2024. I expected my time with Overthrown to be better than the mixed rating on Steam suggested, but my playthrough ended up a little disappointing.
To give Overthrown a fair shot, I began by creating a world on the challenging difficulty on a large map size. The map size is really negligible; it is a pretty fitting playground for a game meant for six people playing multiplayer. I played on a single-player world, though, so I had the entire map to myself.
“For such a small game, Overthrown has surprisingly big ambitions.”
Starting the game, or just the world, as this is a sandbox game, means being thrown into a barren archipelago with foothills, cliffs, etc., depending on which map is picked. I went with the foothills and spent a minute or two loading in, but once you are in the world, that is it.
I spent a lot of the first couple of hours thinking that there would be some sort of tutorial or something to guide me in a very information-dependent game. It was like trying to start a Civilization save without knowing anything. The only semblance of a guide is the quest marker telling you to build a town hall and then houses and sawmills before giving you the basic marker of “expand your kingdom.” Expanding means two things: getting 50 villagers and maxing out the research tree.
That is the only thing Overthrown gives direction on, which is pretty bad when the game involves setting up infrastructure across the entire map and trying to figure out what the 50 or so individual materials even do. There are probably around 30 buildings that all contribute to fuel, food, defence and production needs across the whole kingdom.
The problem is that it is so hard to keep the villagers alive when the ore mining rigs are set at fixed points across the entire map. The second a new villager spawns in, they run across the whole map to get there so they will be employed and actually work them. Running across the whole map proved to be the sole reason my kingdom stopped expanding. Due to the pathfinding of the NPCs, they constantly run right through hostile monsters and then immediately get killed by them. This happened too often because all of my operations were spread out to access resources that were not close to my actual base.
The aforementioned mining nodes can only be accessed in specific locations, and there are sulphur plants that can only grow in set locations, among other resource needs. The only way I found to stop this problem was to run across the map and systematically wipe out every monster nest that was troubling my empire.
This was successful and boosted my NPC villager count a lot from about 20 to the 50 required to get one of the quest achievements. I noticed that the nests respawned after a set time, which immediately brought my count back to about 40. That aside, there is also the matter of the difficulty.
I played on challenging which is the maximum difficulty, and I expected more trouble than I got. Besides the occasional death from massive charging shark monsters, it was a pretty peaceful time. Which is funny because the ultimate goal of Overthrown’s technology tree is extreme military power, culminating in muskets, automated defence cannon towers, and air supremacy via airships.
The thing is, none of those upgrades are really needed. The only thing I did see was that after I got one of the tech tree upgrades, small raider/poacher camps started appearing around the map, which are easily dealt with after already getting a coterie of melee weapons throughout Overthrown‘s progression. I spent the whole game waiting for these raiders that were always teased as the big bad that would always be troubling your kingdom, but they really just never had an impact.
While writing this review, I went back into Overthrown to grab some screenshots and was immediately greeted with a raid warning. This never occurred in my time with the game, so I was actually curious what would happen.
It turns out about 30 outlaws will attack the kingdom, and there is a chance to go fight them before the raid to stop them, but I let it happen just to see. I went out and killed a couple of them before I died and repawned and found that they just left after they got my crown, waiting for the next night to attack again. I didn’t let that happen, but it’s still evident that this only occurred after many hours of game time and lasted less than five minutes.
Aside from that, using the melee weapons is actually really fun. This is where Overthrown shines. I got all the weapons, including a spear, sword, great hammer, and greatsword, along with a shield. The combat ties into the movement, which is another thing they don’t explain. I had to mess around with my controller to find out that there’s a charge run that lets you run across land and on top of water.
They really did focus on Overthrown‘s movement a lot, and it’s somehow both fluid and clunky, but also, for some reason, reminds me of Marvel’s Spider-Man 2. Sometimes, you boost run and get a charge jump off that is perfectly placed to get you over a hill. Other times, it means jumping and hitting a blip that shoots you backwards and ruins any momentum obtained.
There is not even a way to climb up a four-block-high hill, or at least I never learned how to use some specific technique they never talked about. I figured out that it is possible to wall jump on a corner and get up small heights like that. But it still does not change the fact that Overthrown would greatly benefit from at least making the boost jump able to run up walls as well.
“Some little details do make Overthrown an endearing game to play.”
Some little details do make Overthrown an endearing game to play. Timing a series of jumps will net you the signature Mario jump that comes with the same process. You can pick basically everything up and either throw it a great distance. One of my favourite memories of my playtime was picking up a massive stone pillar and tossing it a field away.
But then you get killed by a group of six charging shark monsters and spend 10 minutes slowly killing them all to get your crown back, which, if you lose it to an enemy that kills you, completely stops civilian recruitment. That is effectively a kingdom-wide death sentence if you are losing as many NPCs to monsters as I was.
All in all, Overthrown on its surface is a good game, but for being designed for a max of six players, it feels pretty small. Granted, the map is primed for use with the building system, which is admittedly very in-depth with the structures, but still only has the same buildings and decorations to use over and over again, no alternate styles or colour schemes.
Thinking that way, if you were to just design a massive kingdom, then Overthrown could be played for a very long time. On the other hand, you’re paying 30 dollars for about five hours of waiting for the technology tree timers to finish, some smooth combat, and waiting for civilians to be recruited before it turns into a repetitive resource-gathering game with the same amount of content.
