I only played a couple of city-builders in Steam Next Fest, but I'm glad one of them was Overthrown - not necessarily for its settlement systems, which are hard to get a true sense of in a demo, but for what's easily best-in-genre movement tech.
I'd had my eye on Overthrown for a while, largely thanks to its developers' fondness for showing off how it laughs at most genre conventions. The 'thrown' in that game name is pretty literal, it turns out, thanks to your characters' ability to pick up basically any item in the world and chuck it somewhere new. Within minutes of starting the demo, I was pitching entire tree trunks around the map to speed up the progress of my sawmill and expand my city, and that cartoonish logic can also be applied to entire buildings. Don't like where you've placed your town hall? Throw it somewhere else.
But what if you should throw a villager's house too far away by accident and then need to collect and replace it? In another game, you might be in for an uncomfortably long saunter across your city. But not in Overthrown, a game where the Sprint button momentarily locks you into a power stance before catapulting you away across the map. Your character is astonishingly fast, capable of zipping across your entire settlement in moments, and Overthrown's third-person camera means that you're firmly in the driver's seat.
- I've waited 3 years for this high-speed roguelike-flavored runner, and now that it's finally playable in Steam Next Fest my eyeballs can hardly keep up
- This roguelike city-builder casts you as a benevolent Lord of the Rings villain, and its Steam Next Fest demo accidentally consumed my entire evening
The last city-builder I played that gives you that kind of perspective was Manor Lords, where you can abandon the traditional top-down perspective and go for a gentle saunter around your settlement. Overthrown's protagonist would leave that lord in the dust even at their normal movespeed, but once they're moving at full speed, it's easy to forget that you're supposed to have been managing a city this whole time.
That's because Overthrown's movement is so fun that I was sometimes hesitant to construct any buildings - I didn't want them to get in my way. Instead, I was much more interested in charging across the plains, drifting through the forests, and parkouring up the cliffs that made up the world around my kingdom. Overthrown really plays up its speed with some classic camera and sound design trickery, but it also lets you really feel how fast you're going. Turns aren't jerky, jumpy changes of direction, but wide arcs, your hero leaning into them like a pro motorcyclist. A collision doesn't let you just bounce off an obstacle or come to an abrupt stop - it knocks you on your ass with a thump. Jumps are a question of timing - at this kind of speed, you've got to nail your takeoff if you want any chance of landing in the right place.
I probably shouldn't be surprised - Overthrown's devs have already made their thoughts on things like fall damage pretty clear, removing it from the game entirely simply "because it's annoying" (and to spite their mums). There's a desire to get you moving and keep you moving, a real 'rule of cool' moment that stands out here because it feels so at odds with much of the genre. If this were a traditional open-world action game, I'd enjoy the movement and get on with some hacking and slashing. But here, where I'm supposed to be doing the serious work of building and running a city, it feels like a powerful breath of fresh air, best-in-class movement.
You could read our list of the best city building games, but just be warned that none of them have you sprinting like this.
