This review is going to feel cynical, but to be honest, Frontier Legends made me that way. From the moment you step foot into the game’s cramped, asset-flipped world, you immediately see it for what it is: the most minimal-effort cash grab designed with the use of game system packages, without real passion from the so-called developers or an understanding of what a game should be beyond the most basic outline of mechanical loops. The game contains the typical, forgivable flaws of an unfinished title, but it presents them with an air of laziness that makes them harder to ignore and leaves you with very little to appreciate. The game gives you an immediate poor first impression of its developers, and while I would like to give them the benefit of the doubt, it is harder to shake that impression after going through the game’s Steam reviews and seeing numerous accusations of AI use and shady business practices.
Even the marketing for Frontier Legends is confusing and misleading. The game bills itself as the ultimate Wild West roleplay experience, one in which you can immerse yourself in a living, breathing Western frontier, taking on different jobs or becoming an outlaw as you engage with a living economy and social mechanics. This is all implied by the marketing images, as well as the quote, “Live your Wild West fantasy your way. Become a hunter, trader, builder, bandit, lawman, or something in between. Your choices shape your reputation in the frontier.” It paints a picture of a sort of officialized version of a Red Dead Online roleplay community.
Instead, what the game actually is is a Wild West-themed, open-world, survival-craft game, one in which you can recruit settlers into your frontier town and slowly grow it into a larger city. This implies a sort of ASKA-like game but set in the Wild West. Not quite what I would have expected from all of the marketing, but it is still a good idea.
The bare bones of this concept are present in the current Early Access version of the game. You can harvest resources, build structures, and eventually start your own town by selling the fruits of your labor to the starting settlement or by doing short crafting quests. When I say the bare bones are present, I do mean the barest of bones. The technology tree is incredibly short, and the map is shockingly empty, presumably because the game wants you to buy most of the land and populate it yourself. In less than an hour of gameplay, you can have the beginnings of your town set up, with a house or two and some workstations.
The process of doing so is incredibly boring and at times downright painful, because Frontier Legends currently does not do anything with its crafting or gathering systems. All crafting is simply a menu interaction, which is a system that felt outdated when survival-crafting games popularized it ten years ago. All gathering is a painful process of hitting a tree or resource node one click at a time. Important quality-of-life features or immersive mechanics are completely missing, making the mechanics less interesting. You don’t even have good visual or audio feedback for hitting the resources you hope to gather.
The game also runs incredibly poorly. It’s easy to make a game look good on the Unreal Engine, but if you don’t take the time to optimize it, then all of that graphical power is simply a waste, and even a detriment to your players.
There is a level of incompleteness in this Early Access title that feels almost cynical towards its players. Most of the menu elements that represent unlockable gameplay features, the things you want to work towards, are just outright missing. There is next to nothing to do once you start to get the very foundations of your town put together, and the process of getting there is a lot of boring gathering and crafting that barely even tickles the dopamine receptors that other survival-craft games do. When you encounter an enemy, they’re just walking around with their rifles shouldered until you get up close to them, and then they will chase you across the map and through rivers to kill you. The UI is terrible and generic across crafting stations, with elements that don’t even make contextual sense for some of them.
There is a lot unfinished in the game, which I would normally forgive, but it immediately gives you the impression that these issues are unlikely to be fixed in any meaningful way.
AI permeates Frontier Legends unlike any other game I’ve reviewed. Every art asset is AI-generated, the menu elements look AI-generated, even the voices are AI-generated, and I’m suspicious about the music as well. Any asset the developers could not AI-generate was purchased from the Unreal Store, and while I’m not against using purchased assets, they are clearly used pervasively to avoid any real effort or investment by the developers. The gameplay mechanics are solid on paper, but they offer nothing inventive and lack real stakes or a clear end goal to close the loop. You get to a certain point very early on and lose the drive to continue because there just isn’t a reason to. Even the map is lazily thrown together, with invisible walls tossed up to create the illusion of depth and size in a very small, unusually barren play area.
There is no effort put into Frontier Legends. There is no love. The developers don’t care enough about their own game to do anything beyond the bare minimum to make it technically playable, and so there is no reason for players to care about it either.
That being said, I want to give the developers the benefit of the doubt despite the awful first impression this game makes, so I will share some ways, in my opinion, the game could actually be improved.
First of all, remove all AI-generated content from your title. I don’t care what your personal opinions on AI are. What you generated for this game is just downright ugly, and the time and effort you think you’ve saved by including it has only created an inferior product that will put off a majority of your player base. Most players hate AI, and even without the stigma, the game’s clearly low-effort assets communicate just that: a lack of effort. I should also point out that failing to disclose AI usage on your store page will only continue to put players off your product.
Secondly, hire an animator. Make your game look less stiff, and it will go a long way towards making it more fun to play. Crafting and gathering are a little more exciting when you have animations with real weight and momentum. Your crafting and gathering systems also need work, and I would look at better games in the genre for inspiration: RuneScape: Dragonwilds, Conan Exiles, or anything where the system is taken even a little bit beyond simply putting one UI element into another and pressing “Craft.”
Finally, show us that you have more to offer than simply flipping assets and generic game concepts and packaging them for $30, a price you claim you plan on increasing. Frontier Legends needs something to set it apart from other games in the genre, and it can’t just be the setting. You need a real, original idea for changing the gameplay in a way players haven’t seen before. Get creative with it, even if it’s not the best idea ever, or even if you think it makes the game harder, more of a grind, or simply harder to develop. At the end of the day, your players will always, always value a creative idea, no matter its repercussions, over sloppily thrown-together, risk-free, tried-and-true elements and lazy development.
Pros:
- Strong Wild West town-building premise… on paper
- Gameplay systems are functional at a basic level
- Potential to really grow and become a good game, despite impressions otherwise
Cons:
- Poor performance and optimization
- Repetitive and unexciting gathering and crafting systems
- Generic and unintuitive UI
- Heavy reliance on AI-generated assets and excessive use of purchased marketplace assets give an impression of lazy, uninspired development
- Lacks originality or compelling long-term goals; overall, it feels like a soulless cash grab.
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