Lightyear Frontier Review (Kkat)
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.