Farthest Frontier is a survival city-builder, the team behind Grim Dawn. Unlike many traditional city-builders that lean heavily on urban planning and resource loops, this one emphasizes the harsh realities of frontier survival—disease, famine, raiders, and the constant struggle against nature.

The game begins with a small group of settlers founding a village on untamed land. Wood, stone, clay, and iron are crucial. Seasons dictate crop yields, and soil fertility plays a big role in farming success. Farming is detailed, with crop rotation, soil depletion, and even blights affecting harvests. Hunting, fishing, and foraging provide short-term sustenance, but farms are key for long-term survival. Diseases like dysentery, scurvy, and plague can spread if sanitation is ignored. Wells, smokehouses, and cleanliness are vital. As your village grows, raiders will attack. Building palisades, towers, and arming villagers becomes necessary for survival.

Tier progression unlocks more advanced buildings and technologies. Trade posts connect you to traders for rare goods. Crafting chains allow production of tools, weapons, clothing, and luxury goods, creating a functioning medieval economy.

The game has a beautiful, grounded art style with lush forests, rustic villages, and seasonal changes that feel immersive. Sound design is subtle but effective: wind through the trees, livestock noises, and the tense alarms when raiders approach.

Steep learning curve—new players may lose villages to famine or disease quickly. Late-game can feel grindy, with resource chains requiring heavy micromanagement. Performance issues on very large towns (though updates have improved this). AI pathfinding and raider behavior can sometimes feel clunky.

Farthest Frontier is a rich, challenging survival city-builder that rewards careful planning and punishes negligence. If you enjoyed Banished but wished for deeper farming, more survival threats, and a stronger sense of progression, this is a perfect choice. However, if you prefer relaxed, sandbox-style building like Anno or Cities: Skylines, the difficulty and micro-management may feel overwhelming.

DISASTER | BAD | MEDIOCRE | OKAY | GOOD | GREAT | AMAZING | MASTERPIECE

Reviewed on: Win11 Home 64-bit, Intel i5-11600K, GeForce RTX 3060 Ti 8GB TUF, 32GB DDR4-3600 RAM, 2 x Kingston NV1 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, Internet Broadband 1000/1000 Mbit

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I liked this game. Maybe I'm a derptastic gamer, but I wasn't good at it .. at all hehe :) I'll give it another try and see if my brain can wrap itself around the logistics.

Unfortunately, this game just isn't up to scratch for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it looks like a game from 2005, with an ugly colour palette, low poly models, weird aliasing.. (and the list goes on). It has some serious performance issues, making my (very above specs) PC sound like a jet engine the whole time when playing. Simply moving the camera around is choppy/stuttery for no reason at all, even with high frame-rates, making the entire experience feel off.

Building your city and collecting resources is unnecessarily frustrating: at the beginning, you have to pick a spot where to start your main base to then expand from. However, you'll almost never find a position that has all materials needed, so if you pick a wrong spot you might find out later on to have NO ACCESS to vital resources. The solution is to either just restart the game and find a better spot, or to build another settlement far from your main one, which adds a lot of annoying travel time.

The cost of buildings is fine initially, but you'll soon be required to have absolute mountains of gold (a currency that you gain VERY slowly) even for basic small things like decorations. Same thing with some of the other resources. So get ready to sit there staring at the screen, while your required resources trickle up at a glacially slow pace just to afford some tiny decoration or one building (with the game at max speed).

Everything is on a grid, and while that isn't a problem per se as many other city builders are like that, it takes away from the naturalistic look and feel of the game. The (absolutely horrendous) road drawing tool allows you to draw curves, but nobody in their right mind should do that as it eats away squares from the grids and occupies vital building space. To add to this annoyance, any service building with an area of effect on surrounding ones has a HARD LIMIT on which areas it affects: If a building is even one square off the zone of influence, it receives NO service from the service building. And believe me, you'll need a LOT of service buildings and things of that nature, as this game has an absolute laundry list of micro-managerial tasks and annoyances to deal with (food spoilage, rats, diseases, temperature, beautification, religion, you name it).

The crop growing system is interesting, as it allows crop rotation over a few years, with certain crops having different weather or fertility requirements. The problem is that these requirements are represented by bars that are filled up to a certain point, but which are completely inconsistent with the results: I've had crops that claim to be resistant to certain climates be an absolute lie, and die with a minimal change of temperature.

The various threats that attack your settlement (wild animals, and eventually raiders) are a constant pain in the ass: since any form of defence is prohibitively expensive, get ready to watch your citizens get mauled to death by a random wandering wolf while you can do absolutely nothing about it until MUCH later on. Even a single defensive tower will cost you the equivalent of a bank loan and set you way back currency-wise.

I really tried liking this game but I just can't do it anymore. I sincerely hope it gets better during this early access period, but I've seen no substantial updates in a long time so I highly doubt it.

For any of the devs reading this: I'm sorry, I'm just being completely honest. I can feel the passion behind this, but at the same time the issues are too glaringly obvious. There is a gem hidden in this game somewhere, and I hope to see it shine one day.