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Sengoku Dynasty made me wonder: just how many trees have I cut down in video games? Must be in the hundreds of thousands. I’m a one-man climate changing machine. Reminds me of an old PC Gamer article that ranked the feeling of chopping trees down. Sengoku Dynasty would rank high, I feel. You have to chop the trunk, then chop the tree into pieces, shave off the bark and only then can you make planks. Feels more involved than just, ‘punch tree until log’.
It’s one of many components of Sengoku Dynasty that pushes towards realism, but not so far that it loops right around to being annoying. I could do without, say, the back ache that comes when chopping down trees in real life. By keeping the delicate balance between realism and fantasy, Sengoku Dynasty creates a world that feels interconnected, but never frustrating. There are plenty of rough edges, but it suckered me in. I was sold the moment I looked over a hill and saw a bustling village that I’d built up piece-by-piece.
Settling Down
Sengoku Dynasty takes place during the Sengoku period in Japan, if you hadn’t guessed. This was a period where Japan was busy ripping itself apart, and we play as villagers trying to escape a bloody civil war. We pile into a boat, which is promptly smashed into the land. Turns out we’ve landed on rather fertile soil, even if it’s no stranger to conflict. The goal then is to build up a village, attract a host of refugees and spread peace and harmony across the land. Make that ‘villages’, actually.
I guess the first point to tackle, then, is the building. It’s rather good. Like the forestry, it’s deep but not too realistic. You can carry more than two logs at a time, for instance. To begin, you lay down a blueprint with a hammer, then gather materials to build the foundations, the flooring, the walls, the roof and finally the furniture. You start off building somewhere to sleep, but then you need to think long term: food, water and fuel. That means building production buildings and recruiting refugees to your village to work them. Oh, and you need to make sure you make enough tools for them too.
The more refugees you have, the more their needs increase. Before long, you have jobs feeding into jobs. To keep villagers health up, for instance, there are recipes that need sake. So I need one villager on rice farming duty, a few more brewing sake and one to turn it into medicine. They all need the requisite buildings and beds too. Even without you trying, Sengoku Dynasty evolves into a complex web. It’s never difficult (and my village layouts are certainly a mess); instead it feels like a gentle evolution as your village grows larger. More complex stats, like security, only become a factor once your population hits a certain threshold, keeping things steady.
Poking With Big Sticks
It’s a very clever way of doing things. I never feel like I’ve bitten off more than I can chew, but I also know that recruiting villagers means my resource network is going to need to become stronger. Everything in my two villages feels linked, which is great. Villagers are essential, because the other half of Sengoku Dynasty is liberating regions on the hefty world map. This is needed to unlock complex recipes, and requires using villagers to complete special projects like bridges. It’s a nice way of gatekeeping progress. You need a big enough population and warehouse to handle the loss of workers for a season, and your reward is usually the next level of tools and buildings. It’s an enjoyable loop.
It’s not all hammering in nails and sewing seeds, though. There is also combat, and this is probably the biggest black spot. To liberate territories, you need to kill bandit leaders. The actual fighting isn’t too bad. You’ve got a decent array of weapons, and blocking and dodging feels satisfying enough. Problem is, the AI is terrible. They’ll frequently stop chasing you after a few feet, and quite often get stuck. A winning strategy is to bait them until they get stuck in a loop of agro’ing then disengaging. Then fire arrows into them until they fall down. I’ve liberated multiple districts this way, and it’s very silly.
Then there’s the issue that’ll likely turn off those with only a casual interest: the optimisation is awful. I rarely get over 45 FPS, even in gentle areas, and it frequently dips below thirty. If it just stayed at one rate, I wouldn’t mind so much. It also has poor controller support. It works fine in the overworld, but when navigating menus, I frequently had to switch back to the mouse as it had a habit of skipping over buttons when I tried to use my controller. Changing weapons in a pinch is also a right pain. Given that Sengoku Dynasty was in early access, it feels like a bit of a fumble.
Sengoku Dynasty – Wonderful, But Needs Polishing
The best thing I can say about Sengoku Dynasty is this: I’m thirty-five hours into it and I’m still not out of things to do. In fact, I’ve got a list as big as my arm. It’ll probably be Christmas before I actually finish it, which is why I’ve not really commented on the plot. A lot of world building details are given through chatting with people in the NPC villages. It’s an incredibly slow boil. I was about twenty hours in before getting my second village. I kind of like that, though. The only time limits are the seasons, which change what plants are available. I’m just taking things at my own pace, and I’m having a blast with it.
The roughness here makes me think the scope of Sengoku Dynasty was vast enough that there wasn’t much time to polish things up. That’s not such a bad thing. I’d rather rough but good ideas, than polished dull ones. If you’re a survival-crafting fan and have always fancied mixing in some city-building, then you’ll find a lot to like in Sengoku Dynasty. It undeniably needs some more time in the oven, but if you can get past that, you’ll be hooked for days.
