This is a satisfying, richly built game. I'm a sucker for empire-building, and the combination of fighting and trading kept me playing for two solid hours tonight.
But I can't award a fifth star to such a buggy game:
- Condon's info doesn't always show up on hover.
- I'm sick of watching the credits after each five-second ending.
- Clicking windows to hit "attack" etc. gets pesky when the windows constantly move. It's a very rote feeling that gets in the way of decision-making.
- Like so many games, Frontier has a "mute" option and not a "sound effects only" option.
- Dragging arms and armor to sell is fun at first. When you fill all available spaces up with plunder from ten enemies, it's about as fun as fixing typos.
- Once, I was battling a city, hit a button too fast, and got stuck. I could walk forward, but the building was coming with me, and I couldn't exit the battle. I had to refresh.
I loved beating both guilds and earning a mil. But the game shouldn't be "put to rest."
Update: I wrote my whole review while waiting for the enemy to destroy my decoy cannon. But I forgot that they can't do damage to it, so here I am, being shot at for eternity. Restarting a level because you're stuck in limbo is for puzzle games, not shooter defense.
What a complicated mess. After flicking through chunky paragraphs, I don't get warned about weapon balance until after I buy the wrong combination of weapons -- which I can't undo. To pick weapons, I have to analyze them one at a time with no idea how many weapons I'm scrolling through.
The play is more annoying than a typical tower defense -- lose the wrong gun and suddenly your attacker is entirely out of range. Lose all but your decoy gun and you sit there like an idiot waiting for the baddies to reduce it to zero.
I wanted this to be fun, but it's just a drag. Didn't deserve badges at all.
That was one of the most satisfying hour-long games I've played. The math is just complex enough to be unique, but simple enough that I can easily grasp it and have fun playing instead of getting bogged down in the arithmetic. I've never felt so tense in a land-grab game, which I didn't expect from a collection of blobs and numbers.
More levels please!
 "Frontier"){kind=icon}
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