TLDR: Farthest Frontier has a lot of potential, but it isn't quite there yet.
One of those rare cases where I wish Steam offered a neutral review option.
At the moment, that's exactly where Farthest Frontier sits for me. Despite that, I've decided to leave a positive review for now because the game has a solid foundation and I'd like to encourage the developers to keep building on it.
The game is genuinely enjoyable and already features several interesting systems that have plenty of room for expansion. City-builders like this can be made deeper and more challenging through additional resources, buildings, production chains, and economic complexity, and I hope that's the direction the game continues to take.
A strong endgame goal, for example, could revolve around providing luxury goods to your citizens. Right now, cows and goats both produce milk with no meaningful distinction, and milk is simply turned into cheese. Why not expand that system? Introduce different types of cheese, perhaps through additional processing buildings. Where is the butter? Sheep seem like an obvious future addition as well. The farming system is already one of the game's strengths, with crop rotation, soil fertility, and field management providing a surprising amount of depth. It's engaging to optimize and could easily support even more crops and agricultural products.
Unfortunately, the game is also in desperate need of quality-of-life improvements.
The first issue is resource visibility. Every resource should be visible from the main UI without having to dig through multiple menus. Mid- and late-game resources like iron become critically important, yet neither iron ore nor refined iron is clearly displayed. It becomes difficult to tell what you have, what you're producing, and whether it is sustainable.
The game also badly needs global resource limits instead of building-specific ones. Currently, if you don't want all of your clay to be converted into bricks, you need to locate the brickyard itself and manually set production limits there. In a large city, finding a specific production building can already be frustrating. Once you have multiple buildings producing the same resource, things become even less clear.
This leads directly into another missing feature: a proper search or find tool. As your settlement grows, locating a specific building becomes increasingly difficult. There is a building-name overlay, but once your city reaches a certain size it turns into a wall of text, making the building you're looking for easy to miss among the clutter.
The game also needs better information on production chains. By the late game, dozens of resources are being produced and consumed across multiple industries. If you want to stockpile a specific resource for an important project, it's easy to overlook a production chain that's quietly consuming it. Games like Victoria 3 handle this much better. Hovering over a resource should tell me:
- Where it is gathered or produced.
- Where it is refined.
- Which buildings consume it.
Being able to instantly see that a resource comes from X, is refined at Y, and is used by Z1, Z2, and Z3 would eliminate a huge amount of frustration. In my opinion, all of these quality-of-life features are not optional, they are essential.
Then there's the elephant in the room: the military system.
To be clear, I actually like how the military ties into the economy. One of my favorite examples is the cavalry system. You purchase horses from traders, breed them over time in stables, and then use those horses to recruit cavalry. The catch is that cavalry units directly consume your horse population. If you have ten horses and recruit ten cavalry, you now have zero horses left for breeding. That's a clever mechanic because it forces you to balance military power against long-term economic growth.
The problem is that the military itself feels underwhelming.
It seems like the developers invested a lot of effort into turning combat into something closer to a lightweight RTS. You can directly control units, position them, and fight battles manually. Personally, I don't think this is where the game's strengths lie. Farthest Frontier is a city-builder first and foremost, not Total War, Age of Empires or the like. If I want deep tactical combat, there are already games dedicated entirely to that experience.
The economic side of warfare is much more interesting. Maintaining an army requires extensive production chains, equipment, horses, and a significant gold income. By the late game, a standing army becomes almost mandatory if you want to survive larger raids. The problem is that the army spends most of its time sitting idle, draining your treasury while waiting for the next attack. Defeating raiders also provides nothing, which makes military spending feel more like a tax than an investment.
A potential solution would be to add off-screen military expeditions. Imagine a simple menu where you can send part or all of your army on raids, patrols, or campaigns. This would create an interesting risk-versus-reward decision: send too many troops away and your settlement becomes vulnerable; send too few and the expedition may fail.
The system doesn't need to be complicated. It could simply present a success chance or a basic "can win/cannot win" estimate. Successful expeditions should return with resources, gold, rare materials, animals etc, giving players a way to offset the enormous cost of maintaining a late-game army while also making the military feel useful between raids.
Overall, Farthest Frontier has a lot of potential, but it isn't quite there yet. Right now, it's difficult to tell exactly what long-term direction the game is taking. The foundation is strong, the economic systems are engaging, and many of the mechanics already show promise. However, the game urgently needs quality-of-life improvements before anything else. Once those issues are addressed, the developers can focus on expanding the content and deepening the systems that already make the game enjoyable.
