WITWI - Farthest Frontier, A stripped down but still good Anno [ULTRAWIDE IMPRESSIONS]
2The Farthest Frontier is yet another city builder, this time infused with some unique gameplay characteristics taking from the Anno formula, a formula that is proven to not disappoint.
PROS:
- Unique crop management
- Base defence mechanics
- Anno formula
- Visually pleasing
- Resource production and storing management
CONS:
- Flaky performance
- Minor bugs (Building menu drops FPS to near halt)
- Cant point to selected building in building menu
- No extended graphics settings
- No camera pan, only rotate and zoom
Steam Curator: https://rb.gy/w9b9x
The pros and cons list might indicate to a mediocre game at best, but the negatives do not outweigh the positives. Farthest Frontier has a handful of unique elements to present the player with, at least in my experience.
Starting off, The most notable one in my opinion is the crops. There are 3 main elements you need to look out for. Rocks, weeds, and fertility. Furthermore, players must take under consideration various other risks such as vermin, animals eating your crops, crop diseases, and heat or cold stress dangers that can exterminate the crops. You have to rotate a certain crop rotation each year for 3 years. Each crop has its own attributes, including heat and cold resistance, effect on fertility, weed resilience, time to grow and much more. The challenge lies within figuring out the best way to keep each attribute at bay, all while feeding your peoples.
The anno mechanics are straightforward. Supply each house with the necessary items and desirability of the area, upgrade your town centre and watch the houses upgrade. This allows for more people to be housed in the buildings, as well as make your citizens more wealthy, paying more in taxes.
Anno has citizen classes, but Furthest Frontier ditches that mechanic. This is one reason why I attribute this game with a "stripped down" version of Anno. Any citizen of any calibre can work anywhere without the snobby societal status affecting their capabilities. It is up to you whether or not this is a positive. It is for me.
Properly storing your food is also an important mechanic of the game. Food does not last forever and will spoil relatively quickly if it is not stored properly. After a certain point, you can research how to produce barrels to help with combating food spoilage, as well as upgraded warehouses and store rooms to slow down the rate food spoils at even more.
Besides that, the game follows a standard formula of harvesting resources, turning those resources into refined items that can further be used to create even more elaborate items. Also something that Anno likes to do. Gather iron ore, smelt it into iron ingot, and use those ingots to make tools and weapons. You get the drift.
There is a base defence element in the game as well. Every now and then your people will be attacked by raiders and you must defend against them. Each time they attack their numbers will be greater so make sure your army is growing along your industrial sector.
Other features include trading, exploring, gathering, hunting and so forth.
Overall, Farthest Frontier is a very pleasing city builder, heavily inspired by the Anno franchise. Although some feature are stripped down to make the game less complicated, I do appreciate those decisions. I would like to see a more refined and detailed graphical option interface to allow users to adjust settings such as vegetation density, draw distance, texture quality etc.
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