Farthest Frontier is a strategy video game wherein you must guide and protect your people during the tumultuous medieval age. Developed by Crate Entertainment, this 3D city builder game features colony sim gameplay mixed with survival mechanics—challenging you to effectively plan ahead in order to last for as long as you can with your characters.

Similar to the Age of Empires series and Banished, Farthest Frontier has you plotting out ways to manage finances, goods, and labor. However, while it has beautiful graphics, an amazing soundtrack and SFX, and high replay value, it’s not optimized for players new to this subgenre.

A new beginning

In Farthest Frontier, the story begins when a small group of impoverished people of a money-hungry land decide to strike out on their own in the wilderness. Your task is to start a cozy village and attempt to develop it into a flourishing town. You do this by placing down buildings, assigning villagers tasks, harvesting resources, and turning those into usable and profitable goods to help your population grow.

There are three difficulty levels available: Pioneer, Trailblazer, and Vanquisher. These vary by preset amounts of the starting resources you get, how much wildlife is active, and how much hostile enemies and disease will affect your people. Additionally, you can customize your map more with Advanced Settings before starting a new game. You can even enable Pacifist Mode if you don’t want enemy raiders attacking your village.

This game offers a highly detailed farming system and AI simulation with its proactive villagers. Plus, depending on your terrain—which is randomly generated with resources, as well—the surrounding environment can affect your village, such as wild animals eating your unprotected crops. However, while it offers extensive city-building mechanics, it falls short with its tutorial. There’s no dedicated tutorial to ease you into its gameplay, so beginners can become easily confused.

Requires more optimizations

Overall, Farthest Frontier is a nice colony sim title if you want something with lots of replayability and gorgeous aesthetics. While it’s not easy to get into, especially later on once more challenging scenarios occur, it’s still a promising game that fans of the subgenre will appreciate. This is a highly recommended game for those who want medieval city-building gameplay.