Farthest Frontier Preview friv game - The Hardships of Colonization

If nature has rewarded you with health and strength of hands, and the tyranny of the masters has become completely unbearable, collect your modest belongings and set off to explore new lands in Farthest Frontier, a survival strategy game from the developers of Friv2Online.

Farthest Frontier is a new and somewhat unexpected work by the authors of one of the most challenging Action/RPGs of the last decade. But, if for Grim Dawn the developers created the gloomy universe of Cairn in the setting of the Victorian era in order to attract the attention of connoisseurs of Dark Fantasy, then their new project does not stand out against the background of its own kind.

In the beginning, we will be told a rather typical story about a colony of settlers who fled from the oppression of the aristocracy in order to build a new life on free pasture. A small group of peasants embarked on a journey full of dangers and hardships until they settled on lands free from taxes and masters.

Where exactly the colonists stopped is up to you to decide. There are several initial reliefs: beginners are advised low-lying lakes abounding in fish and surrounded by dense forests inhabited by living creatures; the plains are suitable for farmland and pastures, the alpine valleys are fertile and full of resources, and the land in the arid highlands is inhospitable but rich in minerals.

There is no tutorial in the game as such yet, but if you have played Life is Feudal : Forest Village, Dawn of Man, Endzone and especially Banished, you will quickly figure out what's what, and what difficulty should be chosen for a comfortable start.

Difficulty in Farthest Frontier is determined by four conditions: the amount of initial resources (in the best of the options, they will be enough to survive the whole season), the population of wild animals, the activity of predators and invaders (on a high difficulty, a well-organized army can approach the gates of your city, and you will have to buy them off), as well as the number of injuries and diseases that are easy to fight with advanced medicine and hygiene standards.

There is also a “peaceful mode”, in which the colonists will not be threatened by aggressors at all, as well as a custom game, where the above conditions can be configured independently instead of choosing from ready-made options.

After generating the world according to the given parameters, you proceed to the usual tasks of saving the newly minted wards from starvation and inglorious death in the wild wilderness. There are no special goals other than the sandbox.

The look of the game is not outstanding, but very good. Lacks, perhaps, adequate anti-aliasing for textures to cut off bumps and abolish ladders. Crate Entertainment has drawn nice landscapes and done a good job on the design of the buildings, but the animations are not all done yet. So, for example, peasants often just stand near houses under construction and walk around empty-handed when carrying objects.

Three overlay filters were thought out, illustrating the fertility of the land, the attractiveness of the territory and the presence of moisture in the soil. Filters paint the area in colors corresponding to their quality scale, making it easy to quickly find the best place for the future city hall.

As usual in survival strategy games, citizens in Farthest Frontier are individuals with names, professions, ages, educations, and needs for food, warmth, entertainment, and medicine. Everyone has a personal inventory where they store shoes and clothes for different seasons, tools and weapons, food supplies. And they can also be controlled directly, which is no longer so typical for the genre.

The authors did a good job on interfaces designed to facilitate navigation and monitoring the state of the community, and made interesting innovations. So, for example, in the general information you can look at graphs that will show how efficiently the settlers spend their time, and in the contentment section it is noted what should be taken care of first of all and how exactly the mental well-being of the townspeople affects their work capacity, readiness to fight, birth rate and level of immigration.

Farthest Frontier has an amazing array of professions and their corresponding buildings. Quarries and miners are needed to develop ore, while coal miners extract fossil fuels. It is not enough to appoint a blacksmith and give him metals to do everything in a row - you need a caster and a workshop for remelting. Wood goes to wood splitters and sawmills, then to furniture makers and builders.

Smokers and canners replenish cellars, rat-catchers and sewage collectors maintain hygiene, basket weavers, shoemakers, candle makers, potters, glassblowers, soap makers - there are more than 40 types of specialties in the game, and it's amazing!

Despite the conceptual similarity with relatives, Farthest Frontier has a number of nice little things, the list of which will surely be replenished in the development process. So, when felling trees, lumberjacks first drop and then split the trunk on the ground into logs that are convenient for transportation. Blueberry and other wild plants can be transplanted closer to the pantries; in the absence of wells, peasants go with buckets to the nearest reservoir to replenish supplies in their dwellings.

At the beginning of the friv game, you are given a cart drawn by mules, which is a mobile storage for all sorts of things. Tools, food, weapons, materials and raw materials - everything can be loaded inside the wagon. If, for example, lumberjacks, miners or gatherers work at a great distance from the city, for the convenience of warehousing, a cart can be fitted to them.

The game is still very, very raw, a lot needs to be improved, and some of this at the moment is somewhat overshadowing the gameplay. So, there is no way to impose restrictions on the production of various kinds of materials and products, because of which, for example, my wood splitter, left unattended, got carried away and selflessly let all the wood obtained by overwork for kindling.

Despite the ability to directly issue orders, the game is in dire need of a priority management system, as is done in RimWorld. Residents decide for themselves what kind of business to do, and often, instead of harvesting, they break into replenishing provisions in housing, leveling the surface or felling the forest. Yes, you can manually kick each one, but it's very inconvenient.

In my opinion, Farthest Frontier needs more conditions to set up a custom game: the choice of the starting season and its duration, the choice of initial resources and the number of colonists, and so on. The more you can adapt the sandbox for yourself, the more comfortable it will be to mess around in it.

Optimization moments can be acquired, but at this stage Farthest Frontier loads the system very heavily. My PC didn't "creak" like that even from modern AAA games. There were several sorties and one very unpleasant, long freeze. In addition, the friv game has incredibly long loading times.If you like survival strategy games in a medieval setting, Farthest Frontier is definitely worth a look. This is not some “special variation on a theme”, but a very strong version of an already familiar genre with excellent potential and interesting nuances.