Super Fantasy Kingdom is a roguelite city builder that challenges you to build a small kingdom, restore forgotten land, and survive against endless hordes of enemies in the process. While novel in concept, this early access title needs to work on its balancing issues as well as its actual identity as a game, as I feel it fails to really stand out as a member of either the city-building or roguelite genres in its current state, suffering especially from its overly repetitive nature.
The gameplay loop in Super Fantasy Kingdom is pretty simple. During the day, you build resource production buildings on a small grid of available building spots. These buildings gather and transport materials over the course of a day to build or upgrade more buildings or units. Near the end of the day, monsters attack the city, charging at a line of units, including your selected hero, who fight back in a sort of auto-battler style combat you have no direct control over.
When the battle is over, your units return to the tavern, where they gain XP if you’ve gathered food for them to eat and heal over a night’s rest. If instead your hero is killed by the waves of enemies, the game ends and you start over.
My criticisms on the game begin with the city builder tag. While it is true that you place down buildings to create a sort of city, I struggle to explain why it doesn’t actually feel like a city builder. Perhaps it is the mundane nature of the actual city building. You have limited spaces to place your buildings, and each one feels less like a functioning piece of your economy and more like a tool used to generate resources, resources that are not then recycled back into improving the city but are used more like a currency to fund the roguelite and combat sides of the gameplay, used to unlock and upgrade units and very little besides that. There are very few, if any, ways to improve the city’s already limited logistics and economy. Again, I struggle to really express my thoughts on this aspect of the game, but I can tell you that if you’re drawn specifically to the city-building part of the game, it probably is not what you would expect.
The city building may also feel lackluster with how it falls under the umbrella of another issue: the game’s overdependence on meta progression.
A roguelite game should feel different in every run you play. This is thanks to the randomized power-ups and drops that are rewarded to the player in each run. In Super Fantasy Kingdom, these drops feel almost useless, and instead, what determines how successful you’re going to be is how far you’ve advanced with the game’s meta progression system.
In Super Fantasy Kingdom, progression is handled through the map that you progressively unlock as you play, which carries over into your next run. Doing so rewards you with more merchants and units to interact with, but also permanent boons and resource handouts that carry over between runs.
Because of how the game handles resource production and meta progression, you essentially play every new round of Super Fantasy Kingdom the same. Randomized buffs and units you find are not nearly as important as your build optimization, discovering which is the only real exploration the player has to do. There aren’t any real meaningful choices to make, as you’re just figuring out which build works and which ones don’t until eventually you get it right.
Powerful as it is, the meta progression can also be difficult to unlock, thanks to both the requirements of progressing and how the game fails to convey a lot of information in its current stage. You can have runs where you earn no progression whatsoever, which can feel especially frustrating since each run doesn’t do much to make itself feel unique or different from the last.
The game, in my opinion, could really do a better job of communicating its mechanics. Even after all of my playtime, I’m still not certain if there is any effect to assigning multiple workers to a building, or exactly how logistics work in the town. Combat is something you can easily and quickly fail without a lot of communication as to why, and chances are it has something to do with your build and a mistake you made in it several in-game days before the actual loss.
Super Fantasy Kingdom is a neat idea combining the resource-gathering side of city building with wave defense and the roguelite genre’s meta progression and randomized runs. However, in its current state, I just don’t feel like it does either side of the equation too well. The city building is underwhelming, and the roguelite mechanics feel poorly implemented, leading to a game that is overly repetitive as you’re encouraged to stick with an optimized build and rarely given meaningful choices to stray away from it.
Thankfully, however, the game is still in early access and has a lot of time to improve before release, at which time I would be happy to give it another look and see just how far it’s come from its current state and problems. The devs also seem super active, which is always a fantastic sign for an early access title.
Pros
- Unique concept blending city building, wave defense, and roguelite structure
- Charming art, mixing low-poly pixel models with full 2D portraits
- Longform progression with a lot to unlock
- Active and responsive devs working to improve the game
Cons
- Repetitive gameplay loop
- Randomized elements feel weak and meta progression overdominant
- Limited meaningful choices per run
- City building feels shallow and restricted
TryHardGuides was provided a Steam code for this PC Early Access Review of Super Fantasy Kingdom. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page!
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