Author Archives: Ryan McCaffrey

Farthest Frontier is far from the first foray I’ve fared into the fir-flecked forests of an unforgiving land. But as survival city-builders go, it provides some targeted depth and realism in areas that often get ignored. While I ran out of things to hold my interest in games like Banished fairly quickly, the agriculture and food spoilage system here make running and developing a settlement much more engaging.

The premise is fairly simple. You get dumped in the woods with a few medieval settlers and have to survive harsh weather, disease, starvation, wolves, bears, and eventually – though I didn’t run into any, thankfully – bandit attacks. Providing housing, firewood, fish, and berries is the first priority. But as your population grows, your town center levels up, and the tech tree is slowly unlocked, things get more complicated.

The most significant wrinkle here is the very detailed food spoilage system. If you were planning to rely on the rations you brought with you to survive the first winter… I have bad news for you. They’re mostly going to rot faster than your villagers can eat them. Getting food is only half the battle, because you can make a giant pile of fish and berries in the warm summer months and it will all be inedible mush by the middle of winter. Thus the tech tree is just as much about developing ways to store and preserve food as it is about getting more of it.

AGRI-CULTURE

Even for your tiny starting population, survival just by hunting, fishing, and foraging is a harsh life on the razor’s edge of starvation. You’ll have to develop agriculture to sustain anything much larger or have any wiggle room at all, and that’s where one of the most interesting systems in Farthest Frontier kicks in. In addition to having to find a site with fertile soil for your fields, the ground is also rated for its sand and clay content, with certain crops preferring more of one or the other. It’s possible to gather both from elsewhere and add them to the field if you need to adjust the composition.

Fields also have ratings for weeds and rockiness, which both reduce your crop yield, and require you to slot in maintenance jobs that reduce the amount of available growing time. Some crops suppress weeds, but don’t provide very much food. Some can be stored for longer, but are more susceptible to a late or early frost that could ruin the harvest. And some crops replenish the fertility of the soil, while others reduce it, which makes crop rotation essential. If you plant too much wheat or rye, you’ll eventually ruin the land, so you need to swap in a nitrogen fixer like beans every couple of years.

There are a few different ways to help your food keep longer. Meat and fish can be smoked at a smokehouse, though it has a tendency to catch fire. I didn’t get a good clip of that because I was trying to, you know, stop my settlement from burning down, but let’s just say there used to be a lot more forest over here. Vegetables can be stored in a root cellar, which also helps. And eventually, you can build a cooper to stock your storage areas with barrels, which slow down the decay even further.

AGAINST THE GRAIN

Eventually, though, you’ll have to do what most large, agrarian communities have done for the last several thousand years and transition to a grain-based diet. Grains can be stored practically forever in the raw form – as long as you keep it dry and have a rat catcher on duty for pest control. But it also can’t be eaten raw, so you need to employ millers and bakers to turn it into flour and, eventually, bread, which adds a lot of complexity and daily labor needs to your settlement. It also does a number on the soil, so good field rotation practices become even more important. Cereal is truly a Devil’s bargain.

This is a really interesting and novel centerpiece for Farthest Frontier’s tech progression, where more population requires completely rethinking how you’re going to feed everyone, which creates further problems to solve. Having played a lot of similar games where advancement through the tech tree is a lot more predictable, and less driven by actual historical realities and interesting logistical puzzles, I was impressed.

Along the way, I had to keep an eye out for disease and wild animals as well. If your townsfolk don’t have easy access to a well, they’ll just gulp down some pond water and probably get dysentery. Eventually I had to employ a soil collector and a grave digger, or else everyone would just dump their poo and dead relatives out on the street, which isn’t great for public health, as it turns out. Luckily, building a trading post and selling valuable furs to passing merchants helped me afford all of these new amenities.

WONDROUS WILDS

It looks pretty nice, too. The realistic color palette sets it apart from more stylized city-builders, the buildings have a lot of little details to make them feel lived-in, and the changes to the lighting and ground cover during autumn and winter really help the world feel alive. The interface is a little bit busy, but especially the farming and crop rotation screen are very easy to read and work with, given how deep that system goes.

There’s still a lot more of Farthest Frontier I haven’t seen. Bandit raids and dealing with local nobles become important later, with the ability to eventually build roads and walls and train soldiers. There’s a whole third tier of tech I haven’t even touched yet, and I haven’t been able to open my pub because of a heartbreaking lack of beer. I look forward to seeing my little wilderness village grow into a proper medieval settlement when I get my hands on the full version on August 9th.

Lots of Halo Infinite talk this week! First we discuss our hands-on impressions of the just-released online co-op beta, then we dive into the wave of key staff departures from the Infinite development team and wonder if it’s a bad sign for a game that’s supposed to be a long-term platform for the future of Halo. Plus: Grounded gets a TV show adaptation, and more!

Subscribe on any of your favorite podcast feeds, to our YouTube channel, or grab an MP3 download of this week’s episode. For more awesome content, check out our recent interview with Todd Howard, who answered all of our Starfield questions after the big reveal at the Xbox Showcase:

For more next-gen coverage, make sure to check out our Xbox Series X review, our Xbox Series S review, and our PS5 review.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

Saints Row’s open-world activities have always been one of its strongest aspects, rom Saints Row 2’s Septic Avenger to the Insurance Fraud mode that’s been featured in every Saints Row game. For the upcoming Saints Row reboot, they’re not only sticking around but they’re getting more fleshed out and expanded upon than ever.

In the exclusive video above, IGN is proud to show off four of the Criminal Ventures from the new Saints Row: the returning Insurance Fraud (which has an explosive new twist), Toxic Disposal, Food Truck, and JimRob’s.

We got our first extended hands-off preview a couple months ago, and we’ve got our extensive hands-on report coming next week ahead of the game’s release next month.

Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our monthly(-ish) interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.

It feels wise that Exoprimal, a game that opens with a futuristic weather forecast that suggests the foreseeable future will be cloudy with a chance of raptors, doesn’t spend a lot of time explaining itself. At its core, if you’ve played a Gears of War Horde mode session, or a few rounds of Destiny 2’s Gambit, then you’ll likely feel at home with what a round of this reptile blaster has to offer. In its first very limited closed playtest, Exoprimal shows a solid foundation for a PvPvE shooter, and if it sticks with its strengths like the time attack-style objective racing and interesting class design, it could be well worth sinking your teeth into.

The meat of a round of Exoprimal sees a team of five running through a stage, stopping at points to complete small sub-objectives, all of them involving shooting dinosaurs that are falling out of singularities in the sky. Usually this means you need to kill a certain amount of them before moving on, or protect a static location or object from them for a period of time. It’s not just waves of speedy raptors chomping at your heels either. As levels progress, so do the variety of dinos that appear. The demo didn’t reveal too much of its hand here, but there were occasional flying pteranodons and neosaurs, mutated bipedal baddies that can shoot projectiles or explode when you get near them. The enemy mixes were dynamic enough that progressive waves weren’t just a cake walk.

Enemy teams are doing the same thing as you, but concurrently. An opaque overlay of them can be seen between objectives, giving you a hint of where they are on the list in comparison to you. This indirect PvP was a great bit of tension that reminded me of a ghost car in a racing game, constantly motivating your squad to pick up the pace and find any opportunity to shave off a couple of seconds. Occasionally, you can even directly affect the enemy team’s progress, summoning a large, player-controlled dinosaur and throwing it in their way to wreck shop.

Your weapon of choice for mass dinosaur slaying are exosuits – Iron Man-style armor each with their own role and suite of abilities. Of the ten suits teased in the opening cinematic, just four were available to play during the test. Zephyr and Deadeye deal heavy damage in melee and ranged, respectively. The beefy Roadblock uses a big shield and a taunt to make himself the center of attention in a dino swarm. Witchdoctor stuns the prehistoric pests in close range and can heal and shield your party. I tended to favor the latter two, but one of the real strengths of Exoprimal’s combat is that you can switch between them at any time, readjusting the squad based on the objective in front of you. Defending a VTOL aircraft while it spools up as raptor waves pour in from multiple directions might require more than one tank, whereas one giant triceratops boss stomping around a city block demands a more damage-heavy crew.

If it was just a class-based horde-mode time-chasing shooter, I’d say we’re on track for something potentially great here. Unfortunately, every round ends with a final objective that puts both teams on the same map to duke it out in point-capture or escort-type missions, culminating in a grating PvP experience that I dreaded every time it came up. The escort mission, Data Key Security, makes your team baby a slowly moving objective as it reaches an end point. It moves at a snail’s pace as you defend it from onslaughts of dinosaurs and, eventually, enemy players. These usually end in boring firefights down a narrow alley, with either side either playing peekaboo from behind the objective, or running kamikaze into the enemy squad as melee classes. This at least still felt like it involved dinosaurs, though, whereas the point capture Energy Drain objective tasked the teams to run around the map collecting points and killing enemy players seemingly abandoning the entire reptile concept altogether. And in general, as of this test, exosuits seem poorly balanced for combat with each other. Witchdoctor felt especially useless, as the damage from any of the assault classes was so overwhelming that healing was more of a formality than a viable means of keeping the team in a fight.

Even with a very limited variety of maps and objectives, the parts of each contest that didn’t involve shooting at the other team were fun and furious. I’m eager to see new maps, try on new exosuits, and blast through new types of scaly monstrosities in the future. I’m not so eager to trade fire with other exosuits in mediocre, paint-by-numbers PvP, though.