Sengoku Dynasty Review for PlayStation 5

Score: 8/10

If I’m being honest, I struggled writing this review for developer Superkami’s Sengoku Dynasty. For the sake of full transparency, I don’t like survival, city-management games like this. Call it a lack of patience on my part (and I’ll admit that you would be right), but I personally find that games like this take far, far too long to become fun for me, and I recognize that many elements that make games like this boring for me make them enjoyable for fans of the genre. I stress the element of personal taste in my review because, despite my initial groaning, Sengoku Dynasty is a good title for the survival genre.

Sengoku Dynasty makes the player take on the role of a handful of different character classes that must struggle to carve out a life in a war-torn region of Japan. Though there is a light story that guides the player, the crux of the game is about the player’s personal journal of developing a small, quaint town into their own proper dynasty. The journey is, appropriately, long and complex. The game gives you multiple different tools and builds for your villages to utilize in your various tasks. There are different resources to gather, animals to hunt, and structures to build, and you must utilize everything the game offers you if you want to build a village that will stand the test of time.

The village management is in-depth. Over the course of the game, different NPCs will approach your village, and you will be able to recruit them to your village. You will be responsible for feeding them and ensuring that they have a place to stay. In return, you can use these NPCs to automate some of the more tedious aspects of the game, such as resource-gathering or tool-crafting. Alongside giving the game a good sense of progression, this also helps Sengoku Dynasty sell the fantasy of becoming a lord over a stretch of territory that you built from nothing.

You’ll also need to protect that territory from enemies, and that’s where Sengoku Dynasty’s combat comes into play. As you develop your village, the game will give you alerts that bandits will try to raid your villages in a day’s time. To help with the attack, you can build defenses and arm some of your villagers. Actual combat is a different beast altogether. Sengoku Dynasty’s combat is very methodical. It forces players to juggle various different enemies with a mix of attacks, dodges, and a parry mechanic, and the overall rhythm of fights can take some getting used to. I don’t mean that as a negative. Though the game’s combat isn’t as complex as an actual action game, it requires a lot more thought and strategy than the combat of other survival games. Alongside this, the presence of bandit camps around the map incentivizes exploration, as you can clear them out for extra land and resources.

If I had any actual critiques of the game, it’s with its general performance. Sengoku Dynasty’s graphics aren’t quite up to snuff, and the realistic art style does nothing to hide how janky the game looks. I also encountered several instances of texture pop-in while playing the game that hurt the immersion. I also found that the game’s heavy use of menus didn’t fit well with the PlayStation 5’s controller. The game forces you to deal with a lot of information at a time, and navigating through the game’s several menus with a controller is an awkward affair.

I started this review by stating my general dislike of the genre, and I’ve done my best to keep my personal biases at bay when talking about this game. Writing this review has been an exercise in walking the line between personal taste and objective critique (well, as objective as talking about art can be). I want to stress that Sengoku Dynasty for the PlayStation 5 is a good title in the survival and town management simulator genres. It is, easily, an 8/10, even if it’s an 8/10 that I don’t see myself revisiting any time soon.

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Josh Freeman

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I love games and love talking about games. Some of my favorites include action games (both 2D and 3D), metroidvanias, roguelikes, shooters, and Indies.

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