Overthrown is a cozy city building game, but this time around you are a killer queen that can lift buildings and kill bandits

Brimstone, a Southeast Asian indie band, thinks it has the answer to spice up the formula. It's slapstick cartoon violent.

Overthrown, a town-building game that was featured in Steam's Next Fest recently concluded (and is available for an additional week), is a fairly familiar one. You must build up your population, manage resources and taxation, and keep the expansion of your kingdom comfortable. This game lets you control it all from a super-powerful Queen, rather than an abstract birds'-eye view.

Overthrown allows you to zoom out and plan your town in a traditional builder perspective. However, it also encourages you to live within its world by sprinting, splattering bands of bandits, crushing camps, or even throwing them into low Earth orbit, Team Rocket-style.

The Queen is a true gym-goer, as she can pick up buildings, trees, boar's nests, and anything else. She controls like a character from an action game, with a satisfyingly springy jump and wall-kicks, as well as some satisfying (if simple) one-button combinations. However, you'll spend most of your time planning out construction projects, and helping to collect resources.

At least, the cartoon excess speeds up that process. I found that the best way to gather wood in the demo was to build a large sawmill in the wilderness, pick it up, and push the entire building through a forest blades-first. The mill will eventually fall apart due to the stress of being slammed against too many trees and cliffs, but the profits can be extraordinary. It remains to be seen if this absurd technique is nerfed or encouraged in the full version of the game. I hope for the latter.

Overthrown supports up to six players. This allows for some truly chaotic shenanigans, as co-monarchs grab each other and run roughshod on each other's construction plans. Even with just two players, the demo could be a mess.

It's also a little buggy. The bandit invasion at the end of the demo seemed to have only half the bad guys when I played it. NPCs could also be a bit erratic, but that's not surprising, given that this is a pre-early access demo.

The demo made me worry that the pace of the game may be too sedate and cozy. The demo's combat seemed to be a relatively simple affair, with no need to assign soldiers or build guard posts.

The full game should give both the Queen and her army a good run for their money. Even if you don't, there is something to be said about moving your town hall half a mile downstream and uprooting it. The Overthrown demo will be available until October 28. An early access launch is scheduled for November.