The cozy city builder genre is almost as crowded as soft, easygoing farming sims right now, but Southeast Asian indie outfit Brimstone seems to think it's got the solution to spicing up the formula: slapstick cartoon violence.
Featured in Steam's recently-concluded Next Fest (and available now for an extra week), Overthrown is a familiar enough town builder. You build up the population, manage resources, balance taxation and keep your little kingdom expanding comfortably. But rather than controlling it all from an abstract birds-eye perspective, this one lets you play as the exceedingly proactive, super-powered Queen.
While you can zoom out to plan out your town from a traditional builder's perspective, Overthrown encourages players to exist in its world, sprinting around, splattering bandits, crushing their camps and occasionally just throwing them into low earth orbit, Team Rocket style.
The Queen has clearly been hitting the gym, as she's capable of picking up entire buildings, trees, boar nests and really anything else. She controls like an action game character, with a pleasingly springy jump, wall-kicks and some satisfying (if simplistic) one-button combos, although you'll be spending much of your time just planning out construction projects and helping to gather resources.
The cartoon excess does speed up that process, at least. In my time with the demo, I found the most effective way to gather wood was to build a sawmill out in the wilds, pick it up and thrust the entire building blades-first through an entire forest. Eventually the mill will fall apart from the stresses of being slammed into too many trees and cliff faces, but the profits are extraordinary. Whether this absurd technique will be nerfed in the full game or encouraged is yet to be seen, but I'm hoping for the latter.
Overthrown also supports up to six players, allowing for some truly chaotic shenanigans as co-monarchs grab and throw each other and run roughshod over each other's building plans. Even testing the demo out with two players, things could get impressively messy.
A little buggy, too. The bandit invasion that ends the demo seemingly spawned only half of its bad guys in my playthrough, and NPCs pathing could get a little funky, but given that the demo is pre-early-accesss, that's not too surprising.
The one concern the demo left me with is that the game's pacing may lean too hard towards the sedate and cozy. Combat in the demo seemed relatively trivial, with little reason to build guard posts and assign soldiers.
Hopefully the full game will give both the Queen(s) and her army a proper run for their money. But even if not, there's something to be said for moving house by uprooting your town hall and slamming it down half a mile down-river. The Overthrown demo is available until October 28, with an early access launch due later this year.
