Lightyear Frontier

by Aethyna Apr 16, 2024 | 1 Votes | 41 Played | 0 Reviews

8 rate

Genres:

Adventure

Graphics:

Labels:

Co-op , Building , Cozy , Open World , Crafting , Adventure , Exploration , Farm

Platforms:

Publishers:

FRAME BREAK Lightyear Frontier is a fairly cozy, farming and exploration-driven, first-person adventure game set on a remote alien planet where you are the only pioneer. With the help of your AI, PIP-3R, you’ll set forth to discover the world you now live in, make use of the resources you can gather, build a new home for yourself, and ultimately, help restore the ailing parts of the planet.
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Summary Plotline Gameplay Community Graphics/ Sound Conclusion

Summary

Lightyear Frontier is a fairly cozy, farming, and exploration-driven, first-person adventure game set on a remote alien planet where you are the only pioneer. With the help of your AI, PIP-3R, you’ll set forth to discover the world you now live in, make use of the resources you can gather, build a new home for yourself, and ultimately, help restore the ailing parts of the planet.

Plotline

Earth is doomed.

Seeking a new home and a fresh start, you’ve decided to set off for the Lightyear Frontier.

After your unceremonious landing on your new home, you are now officially a pioneer on a remote alien planet. However, underneath all the beautiful scenery, lush foliage, and friendly animals lies a dark secret – the planet is being slowly but surely consumed by noxious slimes and invasive weeds that threaten to upend the planet’s balanced ecosystem.

Fearing the same fate for this beautiful planet as it is for Earth, you’ve decided to save the planet – your new home – from these pesky invaders. Will you be able to do it?

Gameplay

The gameplay of Lightyear Frontier is centered around exploration, resource-gathering, and building. The game is set on a gorgeous alien planet that’s helpfully segmented into several districts as seen in your handy map. It comes with a custom marker and a helpful indicator to show you where your home base is on the map!

You’ll start off in the sector known as The Meadows, and from there, you’ll venture into neighboring districts to find out what they have to offer, be it a mineral or crop that is specific to said sector or a unique type of fauna that you have never seen before. You’ll also quickly realize that the other districts on the planet are all polluted by some sort of noxious slime and weeds that stunted the local flora and scared away all the fauna.

Thankfully, these “invaders” are easy enough to remove if you have the necessary tools, such as shooting jets of water at the slime and using the vacuum tool to vacuum up the weeds. Though, you may encounter more persistent variants of the same pollution in certain sections that require upgraded versions of your tools.

There are various fauna that can be found in each sector as well. They usually roam around their nests and they are all quite tame. You can feed them with the right food, and they will poop out an item, usually a random resource, in return. You can also feed the nests to get a nice resource boost, meaning extra resources will be restored in the region. Each location even houses mysterious ruins of what seems to be a fairly advanced past civilization. You’ll get to gather and analyze various artifacts that were left behind.

As with most games within the same genre, resource-gathering and base-building are key to the progression of the game as well. As mentioned, there are many different kinds of resources you can gather from the environment once you’ve freed each district from their slimy invaders, ranging from wood, plant parts, stone, and minerals. Different resources can then be further processed via crafting stations that you can then build, usually at your home base, and turned into intermediary materials that you’ll need to obtain better upgrades for your mech, craft advanced goods, and so on.

However, there are some that you can’t gather from the wild, at least not in an efficient way – crops! Don’t get me wrong – you can get the seeds for growing the crops from the environment, but you can rarely get the crop itself. To get crops, you’ll have to grow the seeds first! There are plots of different sizes that you can build in this game, with each supporting up to several plants. Eventually, you’ll get to set up a proper farm by plowing the land and planting crops on a much larger scale.

Similar to most farming sims, to grow crops, you’ll need first to plant the seed using your seed planting tool – it shoots out the seeds like bullets – and then use the irrigation hose to siphon water from any nearby water source to water the plants. You’ll need to water the plants daily for them to grow, but you can skip a day of watering if it happens to be raining. Different plants grow at different speeds too. For instance, polyberries only need two days to grow while caroot and rabbage need a lot longer.

From time to time, usually whenever a new day comes around, you’ll encounter hazardous events, like the Noxious Bubbles or the Falling weed seed event that will harm your crops.

The resources gathered can then be used to craft a variety of materials, with fresh produce mostly going into the oil presser to be turned into oils while minerals go into the assembler to be turned into building and upgrade materials like aluminum frames and copper wire. Eventually, you’ll even be able to ground certain crystals and stone into dust using the grinder and craft clay items.

If you need any additional resources or even to sell off anything you may not need, know that there’s a merchant who will visit you daily to buy and sell stuff. Once you have enough cash, you can even grab some of the amazing custom mech gear off her hands. These items are just cosmetic in nature though and will not confer any additional stats nor positive effects on your mech.

Now, the odd thing about the resource-gathering part is how critical your mech is for storing anything. In this game, you can pick up and store stuff simply by walking through them using your mech. You can also use your multitool in person and hurl items you’ve gathered at your mech to store them. That said, I find it weird that I couldn’t just directly hurl items at a storage box I’ve built to store the items. I must have them stored in the mech first before I can move them to the box. Seems like an unnecessary extra move, don’t you think?

Anyway, considering how important the mech is in this game, you’ll be glad to know that you can flip the mech back to its feet if it was somehow upended and that there’s a helpful unstuck button that you can use in case you find yourself stuck. Oh, and not to forget – you can get encumbered in this game since you can only carry so much, even in your mech. Once encumbered, you won’t be able to jump or run, but thankfully, you can expand the storage space of your mech by purchasing the necessary upgrades at the upgrade depot.

Last but not least, Lightyear Frontier is a base-building game with some light sandbox elements. Why “light” you may wonder? Well, you can decide where you place a structure or a machine in this game and sometimes, the location you put a certain thing in may come with additional effects, such as placing the oil presser within the confines of the workshop shed, which will increase its efficiency. For me as well, I moved all of my farming plots in the game just so I could more easily access the nearby pool of water to water my crops.

In fact, placing your crafting stations near your storage boxes can be incredibly helpful, too, allowing you to tap into the inventory of all nearby storage boxes without having to manually take anything out of them. Similarly, you can place a host of decorations around your home. Reaching a certain decoration threshold, you’ll then unlock extra positive effects that will apply if you end the day at your home… in other words, you sleep in your home. That being said, you don’t get to decorate the interior of your home, even once you can build a proper house and not just live out of a tent. This isn’t a huge issue, though it does feel a bit like a missed opportunity here.

Community

Although Lightyear Frontier is entirely playable alone, the game has online co-op support, allowing up to three other friends to join you in your adventures… or just to spread out the chores around the base, that works too! After all, many hands make light work and there sure is plenty to do in this game!

Graphics/ Sound

The graphics in Lightyear Frontier are nothing short of incredible! Featuring vibrant colors, the visuals here are all very striking, whether it is the view of the Meadows in which you started off in, or the view of the night’s sky and even the sunset. The many cosmetic items for your mech are well-designed too, making players eager to collect them all.

In terms of sound, the game features plenty of ambiance that matches the setting of the game and its cozy theme well. It also has soft background tunes that will chime in now and then. Overall, the music featured here is designed to be relaxing, and it achieves what it sets out to do.

Conclusion

Lightyear Frontier is a truly cozy adventure game where you get to experience the joy of discovery and progress, whether it is developing your base or taking care of the planet’s well-being, in a world that’s void of any real danger. Unlike other life sims, the game may feel a bit lonelier than usual due to its lack of NPCs. That’s exactly why the game features a 4-player co-op mode, allowing you to explore and farm together with friends.

So, if you’re looking for a game where you can explore a gorgeous planet with your friends, Lightyear Frontier is definitely one game you’ll want to check out!

New Game Added: Lightyear Frontier

by Aethyna Apr 16, 2024

Lightyear Frontier is a fairly cozy, farming and exploration-driven, first-person adventure game set on a remote alien planet where you are the only pioneer. With the help of your AI, PIP-3R, you’ll set forth to discover the world you now live in, make use of the resources you can gather, build a new home for yourself, and ultimately, help restore the ailing parts of the planet.