Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes.
Sengoku Dynasty is a survival village builder set in the Sengoku period of Japanese history. I don't know as much as I would like about the Japanese past, but I do know it was a hard time of almost constant civil wars. Because of the setting and time period, I was eager to try it! The game will provide a brief overview of the history in the opening cutscene. The scene is actually a really nice Japanese-style art with a Japanese voice-over. A nice touch considering the game's setting.
Aside from the opening cutscene, once you start a new game, there are five difficulty settings: creative mode that lets you be creative as you want, chillout a relaxed mode that is its verison of easy mode, normal mode that is a blance between easy and hard (this is the mode I played on and enjoyed it as it was the right ammount of challange), hardcore mode that will really add a chalange to the gameplay, and lastly there is custom mode that lets you pick all the settings you want or don't want. Once you choose what difficulty you want, you will be able to make a character. The character creator is limited; there are only a handful of options. Although this isn't a huge deal to me, I know other players love creating their own characters and can do it for hours. You can also play the game with online coop, but because I don't know anyone with the game, I was not able to try this out.
You start shipwrecked with a woman whom you will help, and this also serves as a brief tutorial on the game's very basics. You will have to gather sticks and stones to craft an axe so you can cut trees and then a hammer. You will then have to use your hammer to make a campfire for you and the woman. She will give you some food as a reward. As you do things, you will get hungry over time. Like in many other survival games, you will have to forage for food and cook if you want to live longer.
Once done, you will set off, and not far from you is a burnt-down town. Here you will learn about how to build a village and rebuild the burnt-down village. The beginning of the game is a bit repetitive because you have to build everything and find everything yourself. It is also a bit overwhelming, but if you stick with it like I did, it becomes a lot more enjoyable the more I played and got used to what I was supposed to do.
There are quests in the game that you can do to earn money, items, and experience. There are different kinds, like main quests, that help you learn the game, and doing them will let you build more villages. There are also side quests and personal quests, like getting married. Once you get some villagers in your town, they will also offer quests for you to do, but you only have one season to complete them, and lots of times they ask for hard-to-get items or other items for which you have not unlocked recipes.
Unlocking new recipes can range from leveling up your dynasty by doing things like recruiting new villagers and doing quests. Other ways are with money, by unlocking certain things on the skill tree, by getting certain items or crafting certain things, and lastly by conquering areas on the map by completing certain goals like building watchtowers or bridges.
Once you have some villagers, you can set them to work at different production buildings, like the forger's hut, which lets you set someone to find different things from stone, sticks, food, mushrooms, and other such things. You can also set someone here to craft medicine, build huts for miners, loggers, and so much more. As your village grows, the needs of your villagers will also grow. It will start with needing food for them, but as you get more villagers, you will have to get them or have them make stuff for beverages, maintenance, security, medical, spiritual, and luxury.
There are four skill trees to level up by doing each one's purpose, like dynasty will have you building new buildings or crafting new items, doing quests, and of course, getting new villagers. This skill tree can be used to reduce villagers' needs and help them work better. Next is the craftsman tree. You earn experience for this by mining, logging, building, and doing quests. This skill tree will help you become better at doing things like chopping down trees while losing less stamina, and your axes, picks, and hammers will break less often.
Then there is the warrior tree, from which you get experience from hunting animals and fighting enemies. You will get better at fighting with parries and better blocking with this skill tree. This skill tree also makes attacks stronger and getting more health and stamina. Lastly, we have the monk skill tree. You gain experience for this by buying and selling items to traders and by making offerings at shrines. I found this skill tree the hardest to level up. The benefits for leveling up, though, are pretty good, like letting you get more experience for the crafting, warrior, and monk skill trees. You get one point to spend every time you level up.
Combat in the game can feel a little wonky at first, but as you level up your warrior skill tree, you will be able to block and parry attacks. There is something called poise in the game, but I never could really figure it out other than if you or an enemy loses enough of it, they will become off balance and won't be able to move for a few seconds. I did like that each weapon felt different. An example of this is attacking with a sword is faster than attacking with a heavy weapon, but it doesn't have the range a spear has. You can also use a bow to attack and hunt. Another cool touch the devs added was that if you injure an animal like a deer, it will run slower than a deer at full health because it's injured.
There isn't a lot of music in the game. At times, there will be background music, but it also seems as if it's a track or two per season. I wish there was a little more music when you're in combat. The sound effects, on the other hand, are peaceful. Really hearing birds chirping and water running when you're near a river is oddly relaxing.
Graphically, the game gets the job done. It isn't groundbreaking or anything, but it looks decent for what it is. At times, I did run into some glitches, like plants you can harvest showing, but you can't harvest them. Also, the ground would sometimes load and be blurry for a few seconds when moving. I will say that it has gotten a lot better with the last patch, but it still happens on rare occasions.
Now, although I found the game enjoyable for the most part, I ran into some issues that really brought down the fun factor for me. One was in the map or in menus where my cursor would move all around on its own. This makes placing waypoints on the map a pain in the butt, and not to mention when you're trying to get a certain item in your inventory, and it moves to another where you drop or transfer the wrong item! Sometimes I couldn't even get the cursor to move at all. This made me wonder if the pc version would be a better experience because of a mouse or if it too has the same issue. The other issue I ran into was that I conquered an area on the map, but it never showed it as mine, so I was pretty much locked out of owning that area on the map. It made me feel this game needed a lot more testing before it was fully released.
After sinking over 50 hours into the game I did enjoy what I played, but the issues I ran into made it feel like I would have to restart from the beginning more than once. That made me want to play less because after sinking over 20 hours into one game and over 20 again in another save, I just lose interest in wanting to conquer the game. That includes getting married in either of my playthroughs. I never made it far enough to make it through the marrage quest line. I do know that once you get married and have a child, you can carry on the game as the child. But again, I was never able to make it this far before something happened that made me have to restart or made me feel like I should restart. If the devs fix these issues, I would probably love this game a lot more than I thought I would when I first started, but because of these issues, I just can't make myself restart a new game yet again. If this were an early access game, I could be a bit more forgiving, but because it's a full release, I can't fully recommend it on PS5 until it's been patched. I would gladly give this game a higher score once these issues are resolved, but until then.
Score: 6.75 / 10
