‘Lightyear Frontier' hands-off preview: colourful interstellar irrigation
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Loading... - Oscar Hayes
- 16 Jun 2022
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Lightyear Frontier makes the argument that if a genre feels saturated, you can just blend in a couple more until things feel fresh again. Part farming simulator and part adventure, Lightyear Frontier tasks players with exploring a new land, raising crops, and building up their base. Oh, and it’s set in space. With mechs.
However, the preview suggests that players might be too busy to snap pictures. Making life find a way is no easy feat, and once you exit your landing pod there’s plenty to get on with. With a few caveats, Lightyear Frontier looks fairly familiar: players will need to plant and harvest their crops, unlock new crafting recipes by building new facilities, and explore the world around them. All of this needs to be done from the comfort of a fully-customisable mech, which trades in the homeliness of watering cans and seed dibbers for a fully-automatic planting gun and a scarily high-powered irrigation hose.
There are other tools available (including a satisfying a vacuum harvester for collecting resources) and amusingly, players will be able to dual-wield these tools – perfect for anyone looking to get their DPS (dibs per second) up. Combining mechs and meadows paints a strangely charming industrial-cottagecore aesthetic – two opposites that shouldn’t work together, yet seem to pair perfectly in this instance.
You can build garages to upgrade and decorate your mech, but Frame Break’s pacifist approach to Lightyear Frontier means there are no weapons to make – the most dangerous thing this garage is capable of is an ugly paint job. It’s a relaxing approach, which serves up plenty of the best bits from survival games (in-depth customisation, base-building, crafting) with less pressure – think Valheim without the trolls, or Rust without the…people. Frame Break says that although players can face setbacks, there’s no fail state here – and while the low-stakes vibes are relaxing, it remains to be seen if things like exploration can remain engaging. Read More...
