Farthest Frontier Review – Medieval Survival Village Building Strategy in the Test

Become the Mayor of a Medieval Village and Protect Your Inhabitants from Frost, Disease, Hunger, Wild Animals, and Raiders – All this and much more in the Farthest Frontier Test

Farthest Frontier offers village building strategy mixed with survival and a very accurate simulation of the inhabitants. With very fancy graphics, we can use almost 60 buildings and 26 other construction elements to build a comfortable home for our dwellers and protect them from frost, diseases, hunger, wild animals, and raiders.

In the building strategy simulation Farthest Frontier we build our own village in the Middle Ages, in harsh conditions, but with totally chic graphics and lots of details. The new indie game from Crate Entertainment, the makers of Grim Dawn, had its Early Access release date for PC on Steam on Aug 9th, 2022, and offers a lot for town builder sim fans.

In the review, you can see gameplay (PC, German with CC) of the building strategy game and I tell you after more than 30 hours of gameplay my conclusion, whether behind the fancy optics is more strategy game than in Banished, Anno, Kingdoms Reborn or Going Medieval.

This post is available here as text and as a YouTube Video (German Voice-Over, English Subtitles). So you can choose how you like to enjoy it most.

Farthest Frontier Review Video

German Voice-Over, many subtitles

Farthest Frontier Test – Intro

Hi there, here is the Zap. In this Farthest Frontier review, you’ll get a sneak peek at the new survival village-building strategy game with fancy graphics, lots of buildings, and hazards. I’ll tell you how it is played, what’s inside and at the end, you’ll get a rating from me. But most of all, I want to give you all the info, so you can decide for yourself if the game could be fun for you.

Farthest Frontier is developed and self-published by Crate Entertainment, so we have a true indie game here. So far, there is already a successful game from this team with Grim Dawn. I received a free trial key, my thanks for that. However, this should not affect my review, as I always test all games with the thought in the back of my mind, how would I feel if I had paid full price?

Reading Recommendation:

In case you already have the game, you can find here a lot of Farthest Frontier Tips and Tricks.

Background – an Early Access Indie Game, a Modern Banished

Farthest Frontier now is a new indie game that also aims very much in the direction of Banished. The game had its release date as an Early Access title on August 9, 2022, for PC on Steam. So be aware it is still in development.

Banished has been a milestone in the survival city-building sim genre and is still a great game today, eight years after release, with many fans. You build up a village in the Middle Ages, with the environment, weather, seasons, and also wild animals posing a constant threat. We have to extract from the landscape its meager resources, and provide our people with food, clothing, tools, but also entertainment, education, and weapons, so that they have a chance to keep their settlement for several years.

Similar gameplay also came with Kingdoms Reborn, though there things went a bit more in the direction of world settlement and also multiplayer. And also Going Medieval is very similar, but there are three-dimensional building of a castle and also fending off waves of attacks in the foreground.

Going Medieval and Kingdoms Reborn, by the way, I have both tested and presented here, you can find the links here:

• Going Medieval Review
• Kingdoms Reborn Review – Test

Game Type – Survival Town Builder Strategy

Similar to the role model Banished, we start the game with a few settlers who escaped from the oppressive kingdom of their king and now want to build their own settlement, where everything will be better for them. A cart with supplies is at our disposal and we have to choose a good starting point.

Here the game already starts with one of the most important decisions right at the beginning. Because if we choose a starting point that is, for example, too close to a wolf den, too far away from iron deposits, or doesn’t offer enough food, then our settlers are in for a really rough time. So keep your eyes open when choosing a building site for the village center.

But since we know only a very small part of the world and the rest is obscured from us, we can’t know if the place there by the lake with iron on the hill next to it is really classy as a starting point. Because in the dark fog of war right next to it, there may be numerous dangers lurking ahead.

So we build our village center, send out a few inhabitants to mine wood and stones, plan first dwellings, and maybe a fisherman and a collector to go pick berries and herbs. Little by little, we unlock more and more buildings and goods.

The seasons change relatively quickly in Frontier, so it won’t be long before our first survival test. After all, if it’s going to be winter in the world of Farthest Frontier, we’d better have stocked up already.

Enough firewood, sufficient quantities of food, and, above all, reasonably good clothing and fur coats will help our inhabitants survive the cold season. Because in winter the lakes freeze over, the plants have no harvest at all, but on the other hand, the consumption does not stop.

If any of this is missing, we are quickly dealing with a full-blown crisis. It can get so bad that eventually, our entire village will die out completely.

Gameplay – Simulation

In Farthest Frontier, each inhabitant is simulated quite accurately. Each character has his or her own name, home, workplace, needs, puts supplies in his or her house, and actually has to make all the trips as well.

All residents need clothes and tools, and can also always have a few things in their pockets that they can access, so they don’t have to walk extra to the warehouse or their house for every little thing. They can later get training through schools to work faster or in more demanding jobs. With good shoes they run faster, with a basket they carry more, and so on.

They age, get diseases, can be wounded, and their needs are complex. Citizens have three basic stats, namely nutrition, warmth, and health. In addition, there is satisfaction, which is made up of a total of eleven different things, all of which should be met if possible.

There are more than 20 different types of food, and having multiple varieties available makes the inhabitants happier. We can create parks or build statues to increase your happiness and some farms have stench or noise around them. Therefore, we should definitely avoid building the cesspool or the sawmill too close to the dwellings. Unhappy residents work slower, and if it gets too bad, they can also emigrate.

With few exceptions, the goods in Farthest Frontier have to be transported. So there is no “central warehouse” where you can pack something in on one side of the land and take it out on the other. For each house and each citizen, there is an indication of how much time is consumed by transport and walking around. This hauling requirement also ensures that we always need pure workers as well and should not put all citizens into fixed professions.

Speaking of professions, besides this “free worker” status and the construction craftsman occupation, there are a total of 43 other professions that a settler can take. Based on this amount, you can also already estimate how many different buildings there are in the game in total, which is more than 50 currently and there are more in planning.

There are currently 4 settlement levels that you can move up, unlocking more and more buildings and various other features like trade, watchtowers, and barracks, or better and better homes. But each level is also associated with additional needs and greater demand for goods and buildings.

The settlement itself also has certain basic values, for example, the overall satisfaction, the food supply and the amount of free houses determine if and how many immigrants come from outside and also how strong the desire of the small settlers is to have children. But also the effectiveness of workers and fighters is strongly influenced by satisfaction.

And if the threats, such as frost, famine, rat infestations, umpteen different diseases, wolves, bears, and wild boars are not taken care of enough, there can also be mass deaths very quickly.

Farthest Frontier Gameplay – World and Maps

There is currently no campaign or predefined missions in Farthest Frontier. The map generator has different presets that roughly correspond to easy, medium, and hard as difficulty levels, which we can also set separately for four subcategories in advanced mode. There is also a pacifist mode, by which we don’t have to fear attacks from raiders and attacks from wild animals.

But other than that, there are no further setting options, which is a bit of a pity. Here I could imagine a bit more options, or maybe a map editor, but that does not exist so far at least.

Tech, Graphics, Sound, Engine, Translation

Farthest Frontier is developed with the Unity engine. As a result, the performance and stability are at a very good level. It never crashed on me, and even in a settlement with more than 250 inhabitants, my mid-range PC was able to keep everything running pretty smoothly on 1440p and full details.

The 3D models, textures, and animations in the game are consistently high quality and very slick. There is a free-rotating and zooming camera so you can view the beauty in detail. The game offers very extensive options for the graphics settings, so you can easily play it on weaker systems.

The soundtrack is okay. Most of the actions have some kind of small samples, some several different ones, so it doesn’t get too monotonous. There are also a few medieval-tinged background music pieces that happily drone along. Overall, though, there could be a bit more variety here.

The game has no voice acting whatsoever. All texts in the game are available in 14 languages. There would be Czech, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, and likewise Japanese and 2 variants of Chinese, in addition to German, English, French, and Spanish. And at least in English and German, the languages I understand, the quality of the texts is on a very high level. Almost no strangely translated words and really wrong translations I didn’t notice.

Farthest Frontier Screenshots – Ingame Pictures

Click or tap on the image for a larger view.
In the enlarged view, you can scroll right and left on the edges

Farthest Frontier Test – Opinion and Conclusion

Farthest Frontier caught my eye on Twitter through some enormously detailed screenshots. After doing some research on it, I reached out to the small team directly, because somehow I had a feeling that there was a little gem hidden in the shadows here.

And Frontier’s graphics are really extremely high quality for an indie game from a small team in this genre. There were always phases in between where I was waiting for some stuff and just lost myself in watching and observing. And only the next warning called me out of this relaxed sinking into the details of the world.

In rare cases, there are still small glitches, where the graphics of carts flicker or a citizen with a cart transports something and the transported thing flies far above the cart. And sometimes I wish I had a button to hide the trees when once again a fight takes place in the deepest thicket, and you can’t see any of it because nature is so dense.

Farthest Frontier offers an enormously-extensive building selection

Farthest Frontier offers an enormous range of buildings. There are 59 different houses in total, plus 26 other buildable things such as roads, fences, walls and gates, parks, statues, etc. The scope is really substantial and everything is arranged in an easy-to-navigate menu.

Also, the number of professions, goods and many little things we have to pay attention to is really cool. Diseases you can often see in games, but I think Frontier offers more than 20 different ones, all with little details about them, I liked that, the settlers rather less. But we did have a healer who sells herbs and snake oil.

Observe Soil Fertility and Crop Rotations

With the fields, we must pay attention to fertility. We can fertilize them with compost, but also change the crop rotation of the 10 different plants to prevent too much desertification of the soil because otherwise, nothing will grow there. In summary, in the field of simulation, there is already a huge depth of play in Farthest Frontier.

What I liked very much is that you can use the function keys to toggle through different levels of displaying the details of buildings, inhabitants, and resources, and if you like that better, you can turn it off completely. Likewise, you can disable the interface completely, which allows for very nice screenshots of our settlements.

No map I tried had all the resources I needed available nearby. Probably it is very hard or almost impossible to get a settlement really completely self-sufficient. But for that reason, there is trade with some traveling merchants. But unfortunately, they come extremely irregularly and their offers of goods are purely random. So it can happen that we need a good urgently, but the traders do not have it with them all the time. This makes it not too easy, but can sometimes be a bit annoying to wait several years for something.

Some resources are a little too lacking

What I didn’t like so much was that some resources, especially the ores, clay, and stones are extremely limited. And then these exist in enormously wide spans per occurrence. Sometimes you find iron and are happy that the scarcity will finally be overcome. But when you then switch through the details of the resources with the F4 key, you may see that the iron only contains 300 units. But on the other hand, you can also find piles with more than 8 thousand units.

This leads to the fact that later you have extremely long distances to find stones or iron. This somehow provides both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it gives you an extra challenge. But you should definitely get more opportunities to better address direct shortages of certain resources. I would like to see here, possibly only in the higher tech levels, a quarry or a deep iron mine, which contains somewhat larger amounts of material.

Farthest Frontier still has a few somewhat cumbersome menus in places. Here I still see room for improvement. For many functions, the shortcut keys are missing, even if the game has already made quite good in this regard. But they just started in Early Access and there will certainly be some updates.

Farthest Frontier is not inexpensive for an indie game

With a price of $28.99 or €, Farthest Frontier tends to be on the slightly more expensive side in this genre as an IndieGame. The competition has often been 5 to 15 bucks cheaper at release. However, this game also offers particularly nifty graphics and you can tell at first glance that a lot of work has been put into the small details.

Therefore, I can accept the price to a large extent. But it probably won’t really match until the game gets more features and polish at the end of Early Access. So maybe you should also see it as an investment in the future.

On my wish list is, among other things, a little more replay value, better settings for the map generator, or maybe a map and scenario editor with Steam workshop support. Then follow more variances in gameplay, like small missions, more random events, maybe an expansion towards some kind of diplomacy and/or war with surrounding settlements or even with the kingdom the people escaped from? There are certainly many possibilities here to expand the gameplay even further.

And an absolute dream would be of course a multiplayer, both as a co-op and as a competitive variant. But at the moment, unfortunately, there is no detailed roadmap of where the developers want to go, so that’s a bit of a shame.

Overall, however, it can be said that Crate Entertainment brings a kick-ass game to the market with Farthest Frontier, which offers long-time fun for strategy fans.

Farthest Frontier Review – Rating

For just under $29 or €, you get a comprehensive and challenging medieval town builder game with lots of detail. When evaluating the fun I had with Farthest Frontier after 30 hours of testing, I’d like to go in here with a base rating of 90 %.

For minor flaws in the controls and still minimal problems with balancing and replay value, I subtract 3 % from this, and for the currently not entirely reasonable price, I would subtract another 3 %.

With that, I arrive at a final score now at the Early Access launch of 84 %. If the game improves on some of the shortcomings with further updates in the coming weeks and months, and then also does a little better at meeting expectations for this price, then I see the potential for 90% or even more.

Farthest Frontier

Zap from ZapZockt.de

Become the Mayor of a Medieval Village and Protect Your Inhabitants from Frost, Disease, Hunger, Wild Animals, and Raiders – All in the Farthest Frontier Test

Farthest Frontier offers village building strategy mixed with survival and a very accurate simulation of the inhabitants. With very fancy graphics, we can use almost 60 buildings and 26 other construction elements to build a comfortable home for our dwellers and protect them from frost, diseases, hunger, wild animals, and raiders.

Strategy

Graphics

Sound

Simulation

Relax-Factor and Aquarium-Feeling

State of the Game (Early Access Start)

Fun per Price Ratio

Rating

For just under $29 or €, you get a comprehensive and challenging medieval town builder game with lots of detail. When evaluating the fun I had with Farthest Frontier after 30 hours of testing, I’d like to go in here with a base rating of 90 %.

For minor flaws in the controls and still minimal problems with balancing and replay value, I subtract 3 % from this, and for the currently not entirely reasonable price, I would subtract another 3 %.

With that, I arrive at a final score now at the Early Access launch of 84 %. If the game improves on some of the shortcomings with further updates in the coming weeks and months, and then also does a little better at meeting expectations for this price, then I see the potential for 90% or even more.

4.2

Outro

Do you like to build medieval villages and protect them from hunger, frost, and wolves? Or is the price too high for an Indie game for your taste and your need for builder games is already satisfied? Feel free to write me your opinion in the comments under the video or in the ZapZockt Community Discord.

More Gaming News, Game Reviews, and Guides can be found at the ZapZockt YouTube Channel or here on https://zapzockt.de – Clicking thumbs up at the video, subscribing to the YouTube Channel, and sharing friends can’t be bad. And so I wish you a great day, bye bye, Your Zap

Links and Sources

Farthest Frontier Steam Page

Farthest Frontier Website

Farthest Frontier Facebook

Farthest Frontier Twitter

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