Super Fantasy Kingdom Early Access Review – A King On A Mission

The Roguelite genre has achieved considerable success over the years by combining with other genres and creating new game experiences. We have seen everything from action RPG roguelites to deck-building and card-collection roguelites find their audience and turn into popular franchises. One of the more recent subgenres to gain traction is the city builder roguelites.

Super Fantasy Kingdom, developed by Super Fantasy Games and published by Hooded Horse, is a city builder roguelite with autobattler elements. The game has a unique gameplay loop, challenging progression, and two different kingdoms with unique buildings and units.

A demo was released on Steam about a year ago, which I played for at least 10 hours. Super Fantasy Kingdom was pretty barebones back then, but the core idea was there and I found it very fun and engaging. I was very excited when it released in Early Access and have played over a hundred hours now. Super Fantasy Kingdom has become one of my go-to comfort games whenever I have some free time.

There are two main parts to the gameplay loop. During the day, we manage our city: building production and support buildings, managing our workers, and making food to recruit, feed, and upgrade our heroes and troops. Later in the day, monsters start to attack our city and their numbers rise higher as the day goes on. Finally, during the night, our hero and units have to defend the city from hordes of enemies in an autobattler-type encounter where we can only control their items and positions on the map.

The roguelite aspect of Super Fantasy Kingdom comes in for both of these gameplay loops. In the beginning, we have a handful of plots to construct the most essential buildings, but we can unlock more plots as we play and reach higher scores in each run. We also unlock new units, heroes, and items as we progress with each run. In the beginning, we can only have a few essential buildings to gather resources and the lowest-tier food for our heroes. By unlocking new building plots, we can gather and process resources to build higher-tier troops, feed them with better food, and boost them during combat. We also start with simple troops. On certain days, we can buy new troops from visitors. After progressing for a few runs, we can start with more variety and quantity of troops in each run, and combine and synergize their powers to defeat more enemies.

The overall progress in Super Fantasy Kingdom is mainly tied to how many crowns we get each run. We get more crowns the more enemies we kill and the fewer casualties we have. The rogulite progression was a bit too challenging at the beginning of the Early Access release, but with some balancing updates, it now has a much smoother and gradual path, and you can unlock something new almost every run.

Currently, there are two distinct kingdoms: Humans and the Undead. The human kingdom is the one we start with, and once we progress to a certain point, we can unlock the undead kingdom as well. The two kingdoms play very differently compared to each other. When I first unlocked the undead kingdom, I had learned the human gameplay loop and was very comfortable with it. I thought the undead kingdom would be a reskin with some minor changes, but to my surprise, playing in the undead kingdom felt like a completely new game. The way the economy, production, and troops work is completely unique, and I had to learn it all over again.

While the variety in the gameplay is a very nice change of pace, at first, I found the undead kingdom’s playstyle a bit jarring. I couldn’t connect with them at the same level that I connected with the human kingdom. But the overall progress of the game is currently tied to playing both kingdoms. Over the course of Early Access, there were some updates that addressed some issues with the undead kingdom that made their gameplay loop more enjoyable. And one of the long-term goals of the developer is to remove the requirement to play both kingdoms for late-game progress. While I grew to like the undead gameplay after all, I think this would be a welcome change, as I still prefer the humans.

Super Fantasy Kingdom’s world-building and lore hint at more kingdoms that are planned for the final version of the game. If these offer the same level of variety and uniqueness as the ones currently available, they can add a ton of new content and ways to play to a game that already has a lot to offer.

The art style and color themes also play a huge role in the vibe and feeling of each kingdom. The human kingdom is green, vibrant, and cheerful, and exploring the map and discovering new secrets is really fun. The undead kingdom, as expected, is very bleak and horror-themed. While I can appreciate the aesthetics, I think the muted theme made it less enjoyable for me for long durations. The overall art style is simple and pixelated, but the visuals and UI design work well to help identify everything without needing to read every tooltip, at least after we learn what each item, building, or unit does. There are also some hidden secrets and easter eggs to find to progress certain aspects of the game, and the pixel art makes finding these a bit easier.

The music and sound effects also add to the atmosphere of each kingdom. Whenever I play a game like Super Fantasy Kingdom for more than a dozen hours or so, I have to turn down the music as it can get repetitive. But this soundtrack is subtle and atmospheric, and after more than a hundred hours, I still had it on and actually enjoyed it as background music while playing or even doing other tasks while the game was open.

At the end, I couldn’t be happier with Super Fantasy Kingdom. Even for an Early Access release, it’s a fun and challenging roguelite with many hours of content. The game started with some minor balancing issues, but those were fixed in the weeks following its Early Access release, and the developers are working on polishing the experience even further and adding more content in the future.

Nima played Super Fantasy Kingdom in Early Access on PC with a provided review code. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.