Sengoku Dynasty is a village-building survival game with some potential.
Sengoku Dynasty is a village builder set in the Sengoku period. The Sengoku period was a very strange time in Japanese history, it was a time marked with warfare and strife, but it was also marked with innovation and growth. So, it would only make sense that it was the inspiration behind this interesting village-building game. Sengoku Dynasty is a role-playing, adventure, and building management simulator. First announced in December 2021, and developed by Superkami, a small development studio in Poland, and published by Toplitz Productions.
When we boot up Sengoku Dynasty, we are immediately greeted by a loading screen inspired by classic Japanese wood carving artworks, Japanese voiced cutscenes with subtitles set in a post-war Sengoku Japan. Your character’s purpose is to set forth running from a land torn by war, escaping the old country on a boat, until tragedy strikes. The protagonist character, whose name is unknown, and the rest who are stowed away aboard the ship are cast to sea. You start as a peasant dressed in rags, waking up on the beach with no tutorial hints and only directives to build certain items.
When you start playing the game, you may find yourself searching the screen to find the command button and trying to locate it. You will find the handcraft command tied to the right button on your mouse. Opening the menu and viewing all the tools at your disposal for the time being will mostly consist of basic stone tools. However, you’ll need to figure it out for yourself as, for some reason, Sengoku Dynasty tells you nothing.
You will find that you need resources to craft your tools, and with these tools, you will craft your camp and, eventually, your village. Your first step would be to craft the stone axe, which you use to cut the various trees. Then the stone knife, which is used for hunting, and the stone pickaxe, which is used for mining. And the stone Adze, which can be used to strip the wooden logs of bark and cut them into planks.
With these tools, cutting down trees, mining rocks, and gathering resources in their various forms and stages will be your next step in survival, although, as it’s not uncommon for tools to break in this sort of game, having to re-equip them every time is a bit of a drag when having to make more tools. Venturing further, you will come across a small beach, not the one you found yourself on but one further up away.
There you will find the first interaction and NPC called Ako; it is here where Ako will be the intro to building a camp. Having already built the hammer, which will be the most essential tool in your arsenal to build decorations, village structures, and resource structures, you will be tasked with building your first camp for Ako.
After building her a camp, you venture to a broken village that has been decimated by the war. Speaking to one of the survivors, you will be tasked with gathering wood logs, planks, sticks, and straws to construct the first house in the village. Before clearing the house, you will have to craft a village bell. Bell towers are used as a marker to place your villages, change the seasons early, and to fast travel between your settlements. Once having crafted some defenses and a home, the game will explain how the legacy and dynasty system works.
There, you can also manage your villagers after making homes for the homeless peasants, and you can assign tasks and jobs to them, such as fishing, mining, and building, which will work towards your ideal village. Furthering your village and progressing your legacy will get you access to more items and buildings, along with the decorations you can use to decorate your village as you see fit, giving it a more traditional look to match the Sengoku period.
Sengoku Dynasty is a fun game with potential and some drawbacks. The terrain and environments are done with beautiful detail, and even though this draws players to the game, the frame rate and the user interface take a bit of a hit when in certain parts of the game. Exploring the land and furthering the progress of your village seems to cause frame rate drops, making it harder to get what must be done.
While having tutorials is a normal part of any game, the tutorial prompts and what triggers them only happen further into finding the war-torn village, like having the home and how to build it explained and the effects it will have on the Village. However, these tutorials only pop up once, which can be a problem if you happen to forget a mechanic, so it is suggested to read carefully and take note of the essential mechanics, such as the dynasty system, building, and crafting.
Gathering items can be a tedious process as certain resources, such as rocks, sticks, and star,w can stack in your inventory, but sadly, other items, such as logs, do not, and they take individual slots in your inventory, which, in turn, leaves you with a lot less space for other materials. It is advised that you manage your space wisely and try not to carry more than you need.
The Sengoku Dynasty also has elements of survival as your character has three bars to keep an eye on – Your hunger meter, which will dictate how much food you have eaten. Keeping in mind this bar, alongside your health bar, are the most important bars you will need to maintain because, without food, your third bar, your stamina, will take a massive hit, making the game so much harder to play.
The third bar shows you your character’s stamina, which will be used for all mundane activities such as building, running, and gathering certain resources like cutting down trees for wood or mining for stones, iron, and other resources that require physical attention.
Sengoku Dynasty, with all its fun and its drawbacks, is a good game with massive potential. With a few fixes, the game could take to the top with popularity as seen by games such as Medieval Dynasty or Seven Days to Die, but without the advanced technology, Dinosaurs, or zombies, Sengoku Dynasty embodies the craft and survival of these games with a more relaxed air about it.
The soundtrack of Sengoku Dynasty is a simple composition of wind flutes and a traditional Japanese string instrument called a kotō; while the music is beautiful and ambient, it can get repetitive, making you feel like you are stuck in a Sengoku-themed elevator. The game could use more variety in music, with melodies fading into new melodies; this would help with the immersion of the game and make it far less repetitive.
Aside from building, gathering, and managing your village, a major mechanic would be to create an alliance between your village and other villages, which will aid in the progress of your new living environment, as when you have more allies, you can build more, gather more, and expand your village faster and further. As for character and NPC design, the main character’s movements are rigid and clunky when running into NPCs.
As for their designs, there is no life or character to these entities. Even though the story is interesting, the lack of expression and voice-overs for these already plain characters makes them even more forgettable. This makes the game repetitive and somewhat lonely, as there’s nothing more entertaining than falling for a charming and lively character.
The same can be said for the dark and mysterious characters, all having specific appeals for certain players. Unfortunately, not in Sengoku Dynasty, characters, and interaction make you feel like you’re playing a low-end mobile game where skipping the interactions is more entertaining than listening or reading what’s going on.
Overall, Sengoku Dynasty has great potential if more time is spent fleshing out the game and improving it, as many of its mechanics are comparable to others in the genre, but sadly, Sengoku Dynasty will not be taking the top spot just yet. The game suffers from poor optimisation and a general lack of polish, and you’re better off playing something else.
