Farthest Frontier, the real experience of building a city with unexpected quality

The powerful ignore people’s difficulties. Famine, thieves, bandits, drought: nothing touches them. They want their share no matter what, which is the biggest of course. Indeed, they are so demanding, often making life impossible for those who, while working, cannot even survive. For this reason, some decide to take their few things and leave, in search of unexplored areas where they can start from scratch, to improve their living conditions. This is the starting point of the new game entertainment cagewhich is a huge hit on Steam, where it is available in Early Access.

so we have Tried the maxThis is the title, Discovering a City Builder with Unexpected Qualities.

cold winter

It is a harsher winter than usual. Crops are partially destroyed and there is less food than usual in the countryside. Fortunately, we’ve put aside enough supplies to get through the fateful season without any big ideas, but in the spring we’ll have to deal with some really urgent matters. The first would be to try to understand whether Produce Next year, the second is to prevent wild animals from eating all seeds and crops, driven by hunger.

there Construction Fertilizer should help, to make the fields more fertile and the excrement of our citizens more useful, but we will also need a fence to avoid unwanted invasions. Only in the presence of so little lumber, production is slow and there are many buildings to be built, including some additional housing. Indeed, the relative well-being of our new society has attracted some emigration: there is plenty of work, but the family is about to run out. Also considering the deliveries, there will soon be a small residential emergency.

Luckily productive activities It started and is running smoothly. Mud pits are working at full capacity, and the sand quarry is working as well. Citizens have warm clothes and basic services such as school and cemetery. Hunters have a lot of game, and the harvest of wild resources, such as berries and vegetables, is very fruitful. Wells are able to supply water to the whole country, and happiness, despite the difficulties, is really high. In short, there is optimism in the air and the prospects for the future look bright.

The External threats They do not frighten us much and we have already outlined the perimeter of what will be our first walls, with which we will protect ourselves from aggression. What was once a small community is growing more and more and getting stronger and stronger. And soon we shall have an army thanks to the barracks in the hope that in the meantime the thieves will leave us alone. Everything is going well, at least for now. How long will it last?

So many ideas

At first we thought the extremes were the norm city ​​builder. We also had some biases due to the fact that it was developed by Crate Entertainment, the same studio as Grim Dawn. Not that we don’t like Grim Dawn, in fact, it’s just an action RPG, a completely different kind. However, we had to change our mind pretty quickly, because it seemed like they were able to do a better job than many of the veterans, probably because they didn’t stumble on certain methods. There are some Mechanical Which, after trying it out, makes one wonder why it was not implemented at all or simply. For example, the problem of food deterioration, that is, the challenge associated with the preservation of food products, which makes it impossible to stock an unlimited amount, at least until the production of wheat becomes widespread, as happens in other titles. This is a minor detail, but it allowed the introduction of a whole series of additional mechanisms, largely related to technological development, which makes the experience (and the meat) fresh, despite the introduction of regular episodes of gameplay of this type.

So here it becomes very useful to smoke meat and fish to make them more durable, as well as to build cellars, which are more efficient in storing certain goods than ordinary warehouses. Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve built roads and dwellings, or built defensive walls or designed fields to exploit the most fertile land, but we’ve never worried too much about The actual composition of the earth-Adjustable with the necessary resources. While playing, we learned that soil with the right amount of sand and clay, and with fewer rocks, can produce much more crops. These are the ones that show how the developers have done in-depth research into the genre, but to try and suggest something different, rather than just copying.

The least successful part, even if relative, seemed to us to be combat system, which is a more sinister event than an organized system. Of course, the game’s focus isn’t war, but the hope is that some actual improvements will be added over time, to bring diversity to that element as well.

Technical problem

Although being in early accessFarthest Frontier, it turns out, is cleaner and more solid than some of the titles released in the final version. During the hours we allotted to it, we never encountered any particular bugs and never had sudden crashes, to the point where we forgot that we had a game that was still in development. We guarantee you it won’t happen too often, since this style of title release is used more often to launch what looks like in most demos, when it’s not big and largely unfinished prototypes. There are also several customization options already implemented, which allow you to adjust the difficulty in every aspect. Do you want to sweat every piece of wood, have endless troubles with thieves and fill up a public cemetery in a few years? you can do that. Do you like the idea of ​​playing more relaxed, which doesn’t put you in constant challenges? There are options for this as well.

even talk about it Graphics Farthest Frontier seems to excel (relative to genre): the residents are well defined and animated, the buildings are well designed and they all have a little bit of animation that keeps villages and cities alive and vibrant. Even the natural elements are excellent and show great dynamism, including herds of animals behaving in a potential way, trees supporting the landscape, moving ponds, changes in weather conditions and seasons in real time etc. How nice to see snow begin to fall and slowly fill the entire landscape, with citizens wearing heavier clothes as a result? In short, it’s definitely too early to make a final verdict, but it’s undeniable that we loved what we saw very much. Moreover, we did not experience any problems in terms of performance even after developing a medium-large city, which is a sign that the improvement is already at a high level.