Sengoku Dynasty Preview

Sengoku Dynasty is a blend of multiple genres: an open-world RPG with a strong emphasis on survival and city-building mechanics. Set during the Sengoku era in Japan, this title sees you shipwrecked on an island, which turns out to be the Peasant Kingdom, a society only heard about in rumours.

Upon first beginning the game, you’re tasked with finding the nearest village, which has been raided by bandits, and has been burned to the ground. After talking to some of the villagers, you’re given the ability to tear down the damaged buildings and begin anew, which is where the game really begins. In typical survival game fashion, you’ll be foraging for food and resources along with crafting tools to help streamline and speed up many of these gathering systems. Buildings are built up in stages, beginning at the foundations, and working your way up through the walls, roof, and furniture. Each part requires different resources: logs, planks, stone, and straw, however, some buildings require others, such as clay and bamboo. All of these can be gathered throughout the world; for example, you can chop down trees for logs, and break them down for planks and sticks and for stone, you can mine deposits or pick them up from the ground. Certain buildings help with efficiency too, such as the Woodcutter’s Hut with its attached Carpentry Station, which opens up the ability to break logs down with a bigger return of materials instead of using the tools, which is much more inefficient.

All of this building ties in well with the game’s Dynasty system, incentivising the player to grow the village with more people and assigning them to jobs to not only keep them happy but to help keep the village running smoothly. So far, during the build I played, these systems are relatively barebones and mainly provide a method to progress the story. However, it does have a strong framework to be built on in the future. This is a similar issue with the RPG and skill systems, which are also incredibly limited, providing the player with skill points. Completing tasks relating to different categories reward XP, which in turn translates to skill points, however, the skills currently in the game are very few and provide only minor benefits. Combat is another incredibly barebones system, having spears, knives, and bows but still little to no depth. Aside from hunting animals that don’t fight back, bandits are the only enemy I stumbled into across the game world, which, along with being very few and far between, died very quickly even to my weakest weapons.

Visually, Sengoku Dynasty isn’t going to be a new benchmark for graphical fidelity, but that isn’t to say it doesn’t look good. Outside of some minor issues with texture pop-in, the game looks very pleasant, and, when combined with the impeccable sound design and music, provides a wonderful ambience. This is further enhanced by the cutscenes, which are stylised, looking like traditional ink paintings. I did, however, find the game incredibly resource intensive, having my GPU (3070ti) usage incredibly high, even at medium settings.

If you’re looking for a relaxing survival game, Sengoku Dynasty may just be the one for you. While its systems are very basic currently, there is much room for improvement, and the developers already have a roadmap planned for further developments.