When someone mentions Mechs, my mind wanders to hours spent on Titanfall, Mech Warrior or even the new EXO-Patriot Mechs in Helldivers 2. However, Swedish game developer Frame Break have taken a different approach to Mechs with Lightyear Frontier.
Lightyear Frontier plays as a first/third person exploration/farming sim with crafting and base building mechanics. When I say farming sim, I do not mean spending hours in a tractor ploughing fields, Lightyear Frontier has you and your trusty Mech (I have named mine JD as in John Deere) building a homestead to help support the healing of the planet that has succumb to some sort of Toxin.
The first thing I tried to do was attack a wild bird, to no avail. There is no combat in Lightyear Frontier, you are not constantly searching for food or water or struggling against the elements, instead you are rewarded by exploring and helping the native wildlife.
While you can get out of your mech, you use it for everything. It is equipped with different tools like a spike saw to help you collect materials like wood and stone or the vacuum which you use to suck up your harvest and refill your water tank.
You can upgrade your Mech with different abilities like being able to plant 9 plants at once or increase your water tank and carrying capacity, which I must say is very small. I was constantly over encumbered and needing to drop materials.
Your mech is fully customisable with different cosmetics that can be bought from the local trader with your hard-earned money.
Building your farm is a very relaxing process, you start out exploring the local flatlands finding your first seeds and some basic materials to make your first planter bed and a tent. Be warned you will need to water your crops every day so make sure you are close to water otherwise you will spend lots of your time fetching water. There are a few little niggly issues with building; one being you need an open space to place your structure, if there are any shrubs or rocks in the way it won't allow you to place it. You must back out, clear the area and try again. The other thing is there is no moving structures once they are placed. You must dismantle it and rebuild. You do get all the crafting materials refunded but I'd rather just be able to move it.
Like most games with crafting mechanics there is a real time portion to it. Polyberry Oil for example only requires one Polyberry but takes 60 seconds to craft. You can counter this by building 2 or more Oil Presses and having them going at the same time. You are going to be wanting to be crafting and selling you harvest all the time because the upgrades are quite hefty even from the start. The rank one water tank upgrade requires 18 Polyberry oils, so that's 18 minutes alone and only being able to cue 5 at a time means you must constantly be around to update the cue. I would love to see a slider asking the required amount. Do not change the time but it means I could cue up 18 and go off to complete other tasks.
After you have harvested your crops and got your presses crafting its time to explore. The environment is stunning, filled with vibrant colours and gorgeous wildlife. The map is split up into 9 different zones. The starting area is a vast open space filled with stone, softwood and Polyberries. Most of the different areas are available to explore right away, however they are covered in a toxic sludge which you must clean up. Once done the area transforms revealing new plants and materials to collect and help advance your crops and farm. There are also mysterious ruins to explore each one revealing a secret.
The recipes and schematics are not unlocked by xp or skill points but by finding materials used in crafting said recipe. It wasn't until clearing my 4th area some of the more advanced schematics were revealed.
Each area has a substantial amount of resources but it's not unlimited, and they take quite a while to grow back. I found myself having to hoof it across the map just for wood. This is where Lightyear Frontier plants the seed of sustainable farming. While you are chopping down trees some of them will drop seeds which will need to be planted. These grow much quicker than waiting for them to respawn. There are also animals and nests around which can be interacted with using kibble to help speed up the progress.
I had such a wonderful time with Lightyear Frontiers time just disappeared. I can see myself getting lost exploring for that new seed I can make my millions from. It does become time consuming once your farm starts to grow, I was finding I didn't have enough time in the day to go explore as I was tending to my crops. This is where multiplayer comes into it. Lightyear Frontier has 4 player co-op with friends being able to join each other's Homesteads to help with the harvest.
Lightyear Frontier was reviewed on Xbox Series X. It is still in its game preview stages and is available on both Xbox and PC Gamepass.
