I’ve been playing a ton of Lightyear Frontier on Game Pass. It’s pretty great for an early access game, though I wouldn’t pay $20 for it on Steam just yet, it needs more content and more QoL changes before I recommend buying it. I’m 8 hours in and getting close to finishing what is available in EA so far, maybe about 60-75% done, but what is available has been very fun.
It’s a
“cozy” farming simulator with a very satisfying daily loop with a really great sense of progression. You and your mech crash land on a planet thought to be dead but it turns out it’s full of life and mystery. You explore different micro-regions that have unique resources and plants in each area, and as you find these new resources you are able to start building up your base. Along with this you can build farms to help create oils, upgrade your mech, and build more machines to produce more materials.
It’s a fun daily loop of farming, starting up your machine production, then going out to explore. You have to make a choice to either clean up a new region so it can start producing resources, or go grind areas you’ve cleaned already to gather resources to bring back. One main gripe I have with the game so far is the days are too short, you spend the first 25-50% of it farming if your farm has gotten big, then it’s dark by the time you set out to explore. You have to choose between a new region or previously explored region.
This leads to my next gripe, lack of map markers. It will come in the future for sure but right now you have to rely on remembering where specific things are: remember where the unique resources of a region spawn, where the animal nests are (feeding them gives resource spawn boosts for the next day), remember the path you took to get from place to place, it becomes a bit tedious.
You have to figure out the progression yourself also. Some regions require mech upgrades to your water blaster or vacuum to clean up the noxious waste, and you wouldn’t know it unless you went there and tried. You get all these objectives to clean up regions but it doesn’t recommend or tell you which to start with, so it’s a bit of a guessing game at first. These are my main gripes but they are common early access game gripes which I’m sure will all be fixed, added and updated in the future. Oddly enough, these gripes kind of added to my enjoyment of the game because it forced me to learn the map and explore so I know where to go and practically made me plot my own path for progression (unintentional alliteration).
The things I really do like is once you do figure out which resources should be gathered first, how fast you start unlocking new stuff goes pretty quickly. Every in game day or two you are finding something new, making a new machine, farming a new plant, feeding new animals. That is the main thing that kept me hooked to this game, I kept wanting to see what was next to do. I also really enjoy the space cowboy soundtrack, it is very comforting.
The mech is so much fun to control. It’s fairly basic if you’ve played other mech games, it controls really easily like the Titanfall games. You can get out and explore on foot, there are a few sections that require it.
I recommend this game only if you have Game Pass and you’re into farming/crafting games. There’s no combat or survival mechanics so it’s quite relaxing. I can’t wait to see what updates this game gets, and if it gets enough I may end up buying it. It has a lot of potential.