Farthest Frontier

Steam Reviews

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• Recommended Posted October 3, 2025 on Steam The list of settler/Anno-like games has grown really REALLY long in the past decade, and I have been disappointed more times than I can count, with each of them being just as boring and unfulfilling as the last. I almost cant believe it, but this one is actually good.. like.. really good. The economic simulation is fully phyiscalized and works at a huge scale. No teleporting goods or people. Everything is tracked and flows seamlessly. When your hunter kills a deer, they go and actually pick that deer up and bring it home in their inventory. They then turn the deer into meat, hides, and tallow, and each unit is then physically represented as its carried off to the smokehouse or storage. The smoked meat is then picked up by the grocers and sold throughout the city. The meat eventually ends up in the inventories of various households throughout the town and when people go to work in the morning they will pick up the smoked meat and carry it around in their inventory until they are hungry and eat it. This all happens in the context of a city with hundreds of people juggling dozens and dozens of goods and materials. All this is happening under the hood, and it never lags or breaks. If you like city builders or econ sims, this is the one to get.
• Recommended Posted October 23, 2025 on Steam Best-in-class city sim management game. I'm city game obsessive, from the days of Sim City 2000 to Cities Skylines and Manor Lords, I try them all and stick with the best ones. Farthest Frontier brings the goods. It's highly engaging, challenges you with raiders and wildlife as you develop your new city. The customization is excellent, from screen resolutions to UI scaling and optimization sliders to help the game perform best on your system. I LOVE UI scaling because it allows you to play on a TV from a few feet away. The game runs pretty smoothly at 5x speed on an RTX 4080 Super at 1080p, but definitely gets bogged down once you reach ~500 people or are on a large map with a few hundred citizens. I tend to play new cities rather than enduring at Tier IV so this hasn't been a huge problem, but it's worth noting. I also wish the game had a 12x speed like Manor Lords because I prefer to speed build cities and try different scenarios to see what works best and even at 5x, progress can be a little slow at times. Raiders are my favorite part of this game. They scale up based on the size of your city, starting with 4-6 raiders causing trouble up to 100+ raiders with barricade busting forces laying waste to homes, markets and storage areas. I have played with raiders and wildlife set to maximum aggression because it keeps the game interesting between build outs. The looming threats force you to be mindful of city size and grid development, ensuring optimal routes are the focus of the game to avoid losing villagers. In early access, the game was easier to play as a beginner because the upgrade tree was based on the base command center level (e.g., unlock specific buildings at Tier II, Tier III etc.) Shortly before launch, they added a tech tree which is massive and not super well organized. The UI scaling also doesn't seem to apply to the tech tree so you need to play at a lower resolution (1080p) on a 4K display in order to see what the different options are without squinting (again, from a few feet away.) I appreicate Manor Lords for their grouping of tech tree components. That all said, I have adapted to the tech tree and they have done a nice job of making it a choose-your-adventure style gameplay by allowing you to put knowledge points into what matters most to you, like mining over defenses. Once you have ~40 points in the tech tree, it becomes considerably harder to earn knowledge so you have to choose carefully because overinvesting in other areas can lead to a less fulfilling end game because knowledge point development speed ups were not prioritized early enough. Improvements could be made to the way resources are populated on the map. If you choose a Medium size map, the resources are all much closer together and then quite spread out if you choose a Large map. It would be better (IMO) to keep the resource density of the Medium maps and just increase the amount of resources on the Large map. You have to travel great distances and it can take forever even on cobble road so it makes the Large map less enjoyable as a whole when resources are few and far between. Additionally, the game REQUIRES clay to develop the school, healer's house and other key game achievements to keep progressing. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that clay will be on the map, so it forces you to add a Trading Post sooner in order to develop those buildings. I suspect this is due to some older decisions, when a Tier II Command Center made mining for clay and sand available. This is no longer default, and you have to unlock mining in the tech tree, even if you get the Tier II Command Center. This hiccup causes pain in the early development of your city and I can appreciate that clay may not appear on every map, but sand does and if one does, why not the other? Especially since you don't actually NEED sand to develop infrastructure in the same way that you do clay. There are some UI issues that I experienced at 1920 x 1080, namely the confirmation screen (e.g., Do you want to delete this?) is off-screen and impossible to bring back into the game window. There was also some initial confusion around how to manage policies. I can access them by using the 'J' hotkey but outside of that, how do I access policies? It was very confusing until I figured out the right key to press and I don't see an on-screen element to click that brings up the policies screen. In conclusion, I think you have to be someone who enjoys challenges if you want to excel at this game and I am, so I do. :) There is a "Pacifist Mode" that removes raiders and it took away the most enjoyable change agent in the game so I don't use it, but it may be of interest to others. You still have to survive so it's not exactly a sandbox free-for-all if you choose that mode. I also want to commend the developers on an incredible feat. I have played Banished, Manor Lords, Town to City, Foundation, Cities Skylines I & II, all the Sim Cities, Two Point Hospital, Tropico etc. This game is the best out of all of them, by far. Farthest Frontier lets you get into the nitty gritty and manage hundreds of citizens at scale. It is glorious and pretty well balanced. I wish there were more decoration options, but you can build a nice city/base with the handful of existing options. Highly recommended, it's the best city builder of 2025, hands down.
• Recommended Posted April 10, 2026 on Steam Great game if you are interested in travelling time. You will start playing at a given point in time and end your session at 5am a few days later and remember you forgot to eat.
• Recommended Posted September 26, 2025 on Steam I've been playing this game... for a while. Ive enjoyed the updates and am so pleased that the developers actually listened to the players. Highly recommend if you are looking for a game that you can sink hours into without having a panic attack.
• Recommended Posted March 20, 2026 on Steam Farthest Frontier takes the best aspects of settlement games like Banished and combines them with the mechanics of "civilization" city builders like the Sierra games (Caesar 3, Pharoah, Rise of the Middle Kingdom). This game is pretty unique as you make a settlement and all of the decisions from barely surviving carry over to give you problems/benefits later on as you expand and thrive as a town. This game is basically Banished+ with how it starts and how its UI/mechanics work. You start with handful of settlers and assign people to tasks. Balancing travel time and harvesting basic resources just to survive. The big difference though is there is a lot more variables like food spoilage, crop weeds/rockiness/fertility, disease and aggressive animals/raiding parties. These variables are also affected by the game having different map types and a technology tree. On an more mountainous arid map it may be better to focus on hunting and rushing into a mining - preserving meat to have long term food and trading heavily in metals/rocks. On a lush plains map it may make sense to invest technology into growing forests to have wood and just overproduce food through farming and accepting that a lot of it will spoil. After a couple of years the settlement starts to take the form of a town. It now needs a better way to keep food from spoiling, defend itself from raiders that are growing to size of small armies, ward off diseases that are actually historically accurate in how dangerous they are and make money. Like the Sierra games houses level up and generate more taxes/hold more people from getting access to resources and luxuries (this is handled through markets, not walkers). Every level requires more and more resources and ever increasing complexity. However, this game is more than just a combo of the two before-mentioned games as it has alot more choice and replaybility. What is particularly unique about this mid-late part of the game is that a lot of terraforming starts to happen. Resources run out, animals overhunted to extinction, land where cattle was raised becomes fertile enough for farms or is destroyed by over farming and forests begin to disappear if technology was not invented to manage it. Unlike the Sierra games or Banished there is a lot more decisions with trade-offs. Decisions made to just barely survive may become crisis later on. However, the best part of it is that this game is intuitive and “historical” play is optimal without being forced. One example is the three-field crop rotation system of having one field fallow (fed on by animals eating clover), one growing regenerate crops that still give food and one growing intensive crops (wheat, flax) on a rotation actually works and you will likely get there naturally like your ancestors did by just playing the game optimally with the mechanics available.
• Recommended Posted March 31, 2026 on Steam This is the best city builder I have played in a long time. Definitely reminiscent of Banished, but with combat and more replayability. This game is not perfect but if they keep adding to it it can become close. It has truly become one of my favorite games and every single time I open steam I go check for updates/news.