izigame.me

This is an early access review.
I play Open World Survival Crafting games. Lightyear Frontier is a farming simulator which is outside my normal genre. But a lot of great OWSC games include farming elements (Valheim, Subnautica, Raft). With everything else the trailer showed, I figured there would be enough points of commonality to be worth a shot.
Lightyear Frontier turned out to be an excellent little cozy time-waster. I was able to sink into it and lose hours of my life in a very pretty (if not very deep) world where I was constantly engaged but never stressed. I loved the world design and the lush, colorful environments. The resources and tech trees are simple but still fun to pursue. I rarely had to seek an answer to something online, and I never encountered a bug.
I am not a fan of the folksy farming aesthetic that I should expect from a farming game. But here it was offset by the sci-fi trappings. For example: the AI in the orbiting satellite has a southern drawl and uses words like skedaddle.
I appreciated the lack of Survival mechanics. In every OWSC game, those quickly become tedious. Once you beat hunger and thirst, constantly being pulled away from the fun stuff to deal with them becomes a chore I wish I could turn off. Sure, part of me missed being able to use my crops (like Valheim, Nightengale and Raft) to make ever fancier foods, with my character eating far better than I do in real life. But it was a good trade.
I love base building and decoration. In Lightyear Frontier, you don't design your base but you do decorate it, with increasing coziness levels that offer very nice perks.
I really appreciated some of the choices. For example: I usually don't like animal husbandry in games because caring for animals becomes a chore and I hate the feeling that pets will starve to death if I spend too much time doing the parts of the game I enjoy. So I loved that the game provides an "animal sanctuary" where you can store your animals in an NPC's care if you just don't want to deal with them for a while.
The story... is? Maybe? Not really. But in this game, I'm strangely okay with that. My character came here to homestead, not pursue some epic quest.
One note: I have severe problems with motion sickness in games. Lightyear Frontier is designed with accessibility in mind, including multiple FOV sliders. But beyond a certain point, those create bad fishbowling. I cannot play this game first person. However, I've been able to play for hours on end in third person without any trouble.

Bought it on steam sale, still don't feel like it was worth it.
Pros:
It's a very pretty game. Beautiful, bright scenery, and distinct areas.
It has a good soundtrack. Very calming but stays in the background so you don't notice it enough to become repetitive.
As long as your storage is within a certain distance of your home, you can craft directly from storage.
Cons:
Storage is a mess:
- When you need to find items for buildings outside your home area you will have to sort through every storage finding where it is.
- All storage has weight limits, including player inventory. If you are over the limit you are unable to jump, run, or fast travel home until you fix the issue. But each storage container is also limited in weight and once you hit that limit, you can't deposit more. There is a large storage unit, but that is limited to one item per unit, has a tedious list of ingredients to get, and has a massive footprint. Even a handful of them would end up with storage outside the home limit and therefore outside crafting limits. Additionally, having to go through multiple single-item storages to deposit and withdraw is awful.
- you have to open a storage container every time you want to find out how much space you have left in it.
Crops are awful:
- they take half a day to water, even fully upgraded.
- trying to plow plots is messy, slow, and tedious, but planter boxes will trip you up when you're trying to complete a hazardous event, leading to lost crops.
- you also have to keep gathering more wild seeds (or paying for more) because seeds don't drop in quantities enough from your planted crops to expand to the point where you can start working on mutant varieties.
Exploration is clumsy. You can do almost nothing on your own, and your vehicle is clumsy and awful to handle in every form. There are no upgrades that change that. You will fall over a lot, you will become encumbered a lot, you will end up building storages everywhere to hold things you can't carry, meaning there's bits and bobs of items *everywhere* in the world.
You have 18 minutes in a day. Watering crops quickly eats up at least half of that. Add animals to the mix that you have to water, feed and pet, that's another quarter of the day. Talking to the people who visit the planet, more. Crafting what you need for upgrades, more. Exploration? Well, the good news is that staying out all night doesn't do anything bad, it'll just cycle to the new day and you'll still be right where you are. BUT, you have to be back to harvest and water your plants, and to defend them if you end up with an event. So you'll spend a lot of time clumsily travelling to more and more distant areas (and therefore eating up a lot of daylight, even if you ignore your plants and animals and start out first thing in the morning), just getting started exploring, then have to run home again only to do the same thing over again.
I do like the idea of the game, but I'm on day 60-something, and all the above built up the annoyance until I had a toxic bubble event, tripped over my freshly made planters that were replacing the plowed ground, and lost a lot of plants because I couldn't get to the bubbles in time. And at that point I felt that 'tired' feeling you get when a game just won't let you enjoy something, and I saved and quit. I'll look in on it from time to time to see if improvements have been made, but at this point in time I wish I hadn't played past the refund time limit.

A cool concept but missing a lot of important quality of life improvements as well as real content, it very quickly gets boring and frustrating. Pretty but empty.
It needs more time in development to be worth playing.
In the end I got sick of getting in and out of my mech every minute to craft things and pick up the items then constantly building, demolishing and rebuilding things (because you can't move existing structures) to make them actually fit inside my base zone that I just closed the game.
I won't play it again until it gets the QoL features it desperately needs and some real content to make them worth using.

The moment I started the game the first thing I heard was an extremely jarring voice from the robot that talks to you and this thing talks constantly, every time you fall over, run into a tree, build something, feed an animal, go to sleep, get in or out of your mech, basically anything you do. It's infuriating. One of the first things I did was go into the settings and turn voice volume to 0 because it's that annoying.
From the store page and the videos it seems like the main focus of the game would be farming but it isn't really. Farming is the first step of all crafting in the game because you need the crops which you then turn into oil, but farming takes very little effort or time. You have to water the crops every day if it isn't raining as well as harvesting them but watering, harvesting, planting seeds and fertilising them is extremely quick - this feels like a good thing because it gives you more time to craft, build or explore but then you realise that none of those things have any substance to them either.
I think the game would be better with a stronger focus on farming but it needs all of these things to be more interesting first and they just aren't.
The way progression works in this is you use the vacuum and water hose on your mech to suck up weeds or wash away slime in different areas, then at the end of the day those areas become clean and you have to go to animal nests to feed the animals in order for new resources to spawn.
The problem is that the very first resource you need after aluminium is copper which only spawns in the smallest region on the map and because the resource doesn't actually spawn until you have cleansed the area and fed the animals it was really hard to find it. I went around the entire map through all of the areas before finally finding the one spot where copper spawns.
I very nearly closed the game and refunded it because of how frustrating this was but I finally found it before then.

The thing that actually did make me quit is the item management.
Your mech is the thing that actually carries your items and it can hold an infinite number of items but has a base weight limit of 60, if you go over that you can't sprint or jump in the mech. That's fine besides the few times you might get stuck because of it but you can always drop items. However this means that when you're crafting a lot of items you have to keep getting in and out of your mech to suck up the items or carry the items 8 at a time to your mech.
The game desperately needs some automation and logistics to fix this.
The main issue is that all of the storage options available at the start of the game can only hold 60 weight like the un-upgraded mech, rather than having a limit to item number. For things like crops and oils it's not so bad but you need a lot of all of the metals, woods and stone to do anything in the game and you need several crates just for each of those resources.
You can eventually make a silo that can hold 900 weight of a single item type but these are annoying to make because of the resources you need to craft them, these are also massive and take up far too much space - with such an awful storage system the best storage should not be so tedious to make and too big for the base area around your house.
Another issue is about the houses. When you place your house it has a zone around it where, if storage crates/silos are placed inside it, crafting stations in the zone will be able to pull from those crates. The zone gets bigger for each house upgrade but it's far too small for the early houses, especially because you also need to build decorations inside the zone to get certain buffs.