Sengoku Dynasty is a blend of different genres that culminate into something uniquely different. It’s set in the feudal warring states era in Japan and features part survival crafter, part city builder, part life simulator, and part open-world RPG systems. What sets Sengoku Dynasty apart from other survival or sim games, besides its Japanese setting, is the relaxing gameplay loop. There are no raids from enemy factions, you’re not encountering monsters in the world, and there’s no punishment in case you do happen to die while exploring. What I found instead was an enjoyable and cozy resource management village sim with gorgeous scenery. Here are our impressions of Sengoku Dynasty on Steam Early Access.
The Warring States Premise
Sengoku Dynasty starts with beautifully drawn artwork for their cutscenes, reminiscent of period-style ink paintings. Cutscenes like these tell the major story beats and add a bit of immersion and depth into the narrative which I honestly wasn’t expecting from a survival crafting open-world city builder like this. My humble origins began with me washing up on a beach after my ship had sunk while crossing over to a new island. I just wanted to find a new home, free from the death and destruction that I fled from. A home where I didn’t have to worry about the lord’s tyranny, and where I could farm my crops and prosper peacefully.
Thus, I came to this island in search of the “peasant kingdom”, an area far removed from the turmoil and war of the capital, and without a ruling lord. The survival aspects in Sengoku Dynasty are minimal so far, which is a nice change of pace from many survival games. There is an energy meter, a health meter, and a hunger meter – so no water or thirst meter to have to worry about. Energy gets used up when performing actions, such as chopping down trees or sprinting, and the rate at which it recharges is based on the hunger meter. The more full it is, the faster it recharges. Conversely, it is noticeably slower even when it’s half-full – and practically a snail’s pace when it’s low. It’s a system designed to slow down the pacing and add an extra layer to the management aspects, but honestly, the food is so plentiful that it’s pretty easy to neglect until it really matters.
Food and Resource Management Sim
The food system does become important when it concerns actually managing your villagers’ happiness. Sengoku Dynasty overall feels less like a city and life simulator than it does an open-world RPG and survival craft, but several systems fulfill multiple functions within these different genres. Food, for example, is not only used to replenish your hunger meter but is also required as a resource for keeping villagers happy when going into the next season. When I started to cobble together my new village, building it on the charred ruins of a previous one that had been recently razed in battle, the first resource I was required to manage was the food levels. There’s a whole system for managing the many resources needed for the village, which all tie into the crafting aspect of Sengoku Dynasty.
Crafting Your Own Future
The crafting system revolves around constructing different buildings and expanding your village. I really liked that these buildings are all pre-designed depending on their purpose, so a small house looks different from a hunting lodge, for instance. The water storage building looks uniquely different from the food storage, and so on. This system resembles more of a traditional city builder, where you can instantly recognize a building type based on its aesthetics. However, Sengoku Dynasty changes this a bit by allowing for customization of the buildings. You can decide what type of wood to use for each panel in the construction phase, which changes the outside appearance of that type. You can also choose between pre-set options for the walls, like having no window, a small window, or a large window, as well as even creating additional entrances so as to access the building from different sides.
My favorite aspect of Sengoku Dynasty’s building systems is that you can change the location of buildings at any time. Even if you just randomly constructed buildings without any plan or organization, you can always change them later without a cost. Similarly, you can go back to buildings and change the layout of the entrances and the design of the walls, even after you finished construction. This system mechanic allows players to change up their villages at any time, without having to destroy and re-construct buildings. If you play in another person’s hosted world and get jealous over how amazing their village looks, you can just go back to your own save later and reorganize your village the same way. It’s a good way to prevent people from feeling like they need to restart or make a new save just to redesign something aesthetically.
Gettin' Crafty With Friends
Speaking of the multiplayer aspect of Sengoku Dynasty, the quick and short of it is that it’s a mess right now. It’s an incomplete system, and you can very easily tell. On the multiplayer screen where you can select a host’s world to join, there is no information such as ping, the person’s current progression, how long they’ve been playing for, or their Dynasty level. It only shows the hosted world’s name and how many players are in there at the moment. I have joined several worlds where my ping was so bad that I kept rubberbanding and my character wouldn’t even perform basic actions like picking up stones or twigs. If you plan to play multiplayer in Sengoku Dynasty, then I would only join other friends that you know have a good connection. Otherwise, you will waste a lot of time trying to find a decent match.
Building Your Dynasty
Speaking of progression, Sengoku Dynasty’s primary progression system is based on your Dynasty level which acts as a barrier to unlocking new buildings and features. The main way to increase one’s Dynasty level is to complete Special Projects scattered around the game world. These can range from constructing small bridges across rivers or cliffs to building lookout posts on top of mountains, and more. There are often more costly to build and require a lot more resources than normal structures, so I would often stock up on resources before even tackling these projects. They also require workers to be assigned to them and construction only progresses in-between season changes, which includes your own character as well.
Sengoku Dynasty reminds me of Story of Seasons or Stardew Valley in this regard. Seasons are only 5 days long, after which it will automatically change to the next season whether you’re prepared for it or not. As a nice quality-of-life feature, you can also choose to skip to the next season after the second day – so if you are just focusing on completing those special projects in order to raise your Dynasty level, then you can skip ahead seasons to do just that. That said, I never felt like I wanted to push ahead to the next season because I’d rather spend all that extra time stockpiling resources. So far, I have spent 16 hours in Sengoku Dynasty which is enough to encompass a full year’s worth of seasons and then some.
Sengoku Dynasty opens up more as my Dynasty level increases, with new buildings and items to craft. However, there’s not quite enough to keep my interest peaked during the lulls in-between each level. The village management systems seem barebones so far, with only a handful of resources to actually monitor and be able to provide for the villagers, such as food and water. Some aspects aren’t explained very well either, such as how to keep your villagers happy. It took me forever to realize that you had to toggle the happiness gauge for each resource on the village overview screen. I went almost the full first year not knowing why my villagers were getting increasingly unhappy, even though I had been stockpiling tons of food and water for them. It was because, despite the surplus, I apparently wasn’t sharing it each season.
Looking to a Future Dynasty
There are a lot more features coming down the pipeline, according to developer Superkami, including marriage, children, player aging, a more robust combat system, new weapons, and new enemies. As of yesterday, they’ve already updated Sengoku Dynasty with its first proper patch which fixed a lot of bugs and issues, as well as made some improvements to tool durability and more. It is nice to see developers being so transparent and communicating with their fans, especially for an Early Access title like Sengoku Dynasty. It makes me believe that we will definitely see it only grow and get better rather than stagnate and eventually fizzle out like so many others.
Sengoku Dynasty has a lot to enjoy so far and it has only just been released in Early Access. My biggest hope is that we will see more substantial improvements to the Multiplayer systems in particular sooner rather than later, like being able to check the host’s latency or ping. I would love to hop into others’ villages and help them gather resources and build them up, but right now it is more of a hassle to try and find a decent host to the point that it dissuades me from even trying. Overall, I think the teams at Superkami and Toplitz might have a cult sleeper on their hands, but it will really depend on the cadence of updates that we see and the number of new features implemented. I’m excited for more in Sengoku Dynasty, but after only 16 hours I feel as if I’ve already seen almost everything that’s available right now in early access.
