Ancient Frontier

TLDR: If you’re looking for a decent tactical space combat game with some strategy and RPG elements, this game might be for you, despite some shortcomings that prevent it from being great. + Small but decent selection of space vessels to choose from + Lots of skills and equipment upgrades for vessels available + Selection of crew adds nice bonuses to vessels + Overarching campaign from 2 different factions allows for several hours of gameplay + Turn-based tactical combat is decent, making use of cover, environment and LOS + Persistent XP allows vessels to level up and carry over to the next mission + Combat missions and simulator missions allow you to gain valuable resources & XP - Terrible voice acting. It would have been better to eliminate this completely - RPG elements could have been better. Only the main characters have “personalities.” The crew have none. There is no way to improve crew stats except through combat - After a point, it can get grindy -- you need to level your ships through combat, otherwise the missions may be too difficult - Space combat is 2D (a little strange, but understandable), hex-based and table-top like - Not much of a story, weak plot and characters you don’t really care about Ancient Frontier serves its purpose if all you’re looking for is a decent space combat campaign to pass the time. I typically skip the dialogue cutscenes since they add nothing to the story and the voice acting is excruciating. Seriously. The game would have been better without it, and run on captions instead. Interactive choices during dialogue that affect the game would have been a nice touch too. Building your small flotilla of specialized ships can be fun, as is upgrading them and deploying them in combat with crew members you recruit. This is AF’s main saving grace. Ancient Frontier makes the grade, but just barely. If you aren’t good at tactical combat, this game isn’t for you. 5.0/10.0

EDITED 15/02/2021 EDITED 26/02/2021 I'm going to give this a "Not Recommended" simply because there is no "Meh" option. The game is not a _bad_ TBS mechanically, but it is very basic and has a lot of minor frustrations and the storyline is entirely forgettable. Only pick it up if it's on steep sale ($10 or less USD). It's highly unlikely I will ever actually finish this game, I got bored and stopped playing around halfway through Sector 3 after something like 12 hours of gameplay. Pros: - Turn-based spaceship tactics which isn't terrible to look at and is decent mechanically. - Resource management and ship customization adds some actual between-mission decisions, between buying new ships or buying equipment/officers or researching upgrades that affect entire ship classes. - Story missions are at least hand-crafted, so they tend to each be unique and interesting in one way or another. - Not bad for a budget game if you're craving spaceship combat and you've played almost everything else that's available. Cons: - So. Many. Loading. Screens. Pick a mission? Loading screen. Want to go back and fix a ship first? Loading screen. I can understand loading screens between the mission itself and the HQ menus, but why are there loading screens in between HQ menus? - Enemy AI only cares about individual ships, so it's relatively easy to keep your own fleet bunched up and steamroll groups of 2-3 enemy ships at a time while other enemy ships that can't see you will just stay in one spot. Also makes it stupidly annoying sometimes to track down the last couple of enemy ships if the primary mission is to destroy all enemies and a few are literally in the corner of the map. This also seems to happen on "defend outpost" missions, which makes even less sense since most enemies don't go anywhere near the outpost they're supposedly attacking and thus there's no real way to actually lose that type of mission by the outpost being destroyed. - There's no way to preview ship abilities before buying, so all you have to go by are the basic stats and the flavour text. The flavour text can also be misleading. Example: the Predator Corvette says it has 3 sets of twin pulse lasers giving it the anti-fighter capability of an entire battlegroup, so I assumed it would get to fire its pulse guns for free once per turn or its pulse lasers would deal 2-3x normal damage or something similar. Nope, it has exactly the same twin pulse guns as the frigate or destroyer, so you might as well just save your money and invest in one of the bigger ships. - Neither the number of spaces a ship can move using one move action, nor the sensor range of a ship, are listed anywhere on the ship's stats. - Mines only detonate when your ships are nearby, unless manually detonated by AOE attacks - so not only do they pose a danger to your own ships, they actively provide cover for enemy ships. Not sure if this is because the AI isn't smart enough to avoid them so was just programmed to not trigger them, or if there's some lore reason why every minefield (even those near your own faction's stations?) is controlled by the enemy. - There is no real meaningful ship specialization or fleet composition. The starting ship roster, barring the scout fighters, are basically just upgrades on each other so there's no point buying anything other than Destroyers after picking up a couple of scout fighters. Example: the Destroyer has anti-fighter twin pulse lasers, an anti-shield ion cannon, more powerful main guns, a railgun, can still boost its engines every 2 turns, and only costs 2x as much to buy (4x to deploy) as a crappy Manta fighter. It also has 1 move and 3 actions, so when upgraded to 2 moves and 4 actions (1000 data for research) it's easily the best ship out of the entire starting roster and can perform the same roles as the corvette or fighter or frigate but better. The only consideration is the deployment energy cost, but tbh you can use the money you saved buying just 3 Destroyers instead of a bunch of fighters and corvettes and frigates to buy more energy. And then once you get battleships, start buying and upgrading them instead. - There is no way to see what mission you picked when selecting your fleet, so if you forget the difficulty or what kind of mission it was you have to go back to the Missions screen. This would be a slightly smaller annoyance if there wasn't a loading screen between the Missions screen and selecting your fleet for deployment. As a minor addendum, mission variety and enemy composition variety are lacking. - The same type of mission could have a different set of objectives, so for instance a convoy escort mission could end up with your primary objective being to eliminate all enemies or just getting a single ship to the destination beacon. Realistically you should know exactly what at least your primary objective will be, which means you could then actually make meaningful decisions about fleet composition other than "assume you'll have to kill all enemies". Also really annoying when you end up in a timed mission that you had no idea was going to be timed, especially if the primary objective is unexpected. - Backup saves are pointless, they all seem to be exactly the same as the primary save so why bother having backup saves. I assumed the backup saves would be like the last 5 saves for that save slot, but no it's literally all backup copies of your latest save. If this is to counter-act save file corruption, (1) why not just keep multiple copies of the save under the hood and try to load the next backup in sequence if the main one is corrupted and (2) if it's that easy to corrupt saves I think there are bigger issues. - Grindy as hell. There are like 30 missions per campaign plus you can do 3-4 side missions between each mission. So if you wanted to complete a single campaign you're looking at 30-120 missions, or 60-240 for the entire game. At maybe 30 minutes per mission (including time spent in fleet management between missions), that's anywhere from 15-120 hours. Normally this would be a good thing, however before you've even finished 10 story missions you will have seen essentially everything the game has to offer, and as such the way you play the game won't really change or become more interesting. Combined with the fact that the storyline and dialog is horribly cheesy and forgettable, the game starts to feel more like a chore than something keeping the player engaged.

I like turn based tactical games, so I probably enjoyed this game more than many will, but I can't recommend it due to two major issues. The primary issues I have with the game are: The game / combat is a grind The game becomes a grind fairly early. With 30 missions per campaign (Alliance / Federation) and up to 3 missions in between story missions, you can play 90 missions per campaign if you grind the experience and resource missions in between the story missions. Even if you only do some of the experience and resource missions (as you will likely need to if you playing on the harder difficulties), it's a really long and repetitive grind to the end of the game. You've seen just about all the combat tactics and variations you're going to see about 1/4 way into the game, and while you do get a few new ships and better parts and crew, the combat really doesn't change, nor does it become more interesting. Story / Dialogue Easily the worst and most cheesy dialogue I have ever suffered through in a game. Not just bad, awful! You don't expect a great story from a game like this, but I'm not sure if you could make a worse story with worse dialogue if you tried.

Stupid, sexy, spaceships. This one is janky, but I mean...its made by exactly two dudes. The story and voice acting aren't as awful as the Starpoint Gemini games so let that be your standard. Basically its a tactical RPG with light fleet management and spaceships. I really don't know what more you need. Its alot easier than say Battlestar Galactica Deadlock. I just wanna watch spaceships blow each other up right now, and this game is perfect for that. Just be aware of the tiny development team. Its definately an indie gem.

Not bad as a tactical space game. It's unclear if there are any significant choices to make - it seems like you can focus on capital ships, dabble in fighters, and completely ignore escorts, and have a winning fleet. But, oh, boy, the plotting! The writing makes all the characters unsympathetic, but it's the plot of the campaign that makes me want to flip the table here. The storyteller is not playing fair with the characters, and cancels their work - it's essentially a "negadungeon", where the most winning outcome is not playing at all.

If you have the 8gb ram+ the gam requires it might run ok for a mission or two. If you get past starting the campaign, or your loaded save actually works. The auto save feature tries to save during a mission and makes backups only of that same mission so they all just cause the game to exit instead of loading. So don't use it if your gonna try to play. Manually save at the start of each turn, maybe even going as far to switch between 2 or 3 different save slots. It really is a shame that the game just isn't stable it seems.

Enjoyable game, but it has its difficulty spikes at times.

This is not a good game. Why? A lack of interesting choices and not much thought required. [list] [*] Awful dialog. A juvenile plot is fully voiced before key missions. Yay?!? [*] Dumb AI on hard difficulty. If it can, the AI always spreads its shots between your ships. Also the AI will always move and fire, then move closer and fire again. The closer you are the better the odds, so this makes no sense. [*] Many repetitive missions. Same ships in greater number. Map different in the placement of asteroids, mines and planets. Kill all the ships. Repeat endlessly. [*] Lose a key ship? Mission abruptly ends and you have to redo the entire mission. What exactly happened? You might not know as this all happened in a second. [/list]

I really want to like this game. Starting out, its great. I laughed my way through the tutorial and the hammy flirtations. They were excellent. The basic game play is solid, the story is decent, and the voice acting is better than good enough. The reason I can't recommend it is because the gameplay is very repetitive. The formula is story mission then 3 side missions, repeat. That may not be bad, except that the gameplay is the same and the mission objectives have little practical variation. There is not a practical variety of units. Given how upgrades work and the lack of specialization outside of scouts, you really just focus on one or two ship types for the entire thing, Because there is little variation in the units you use or face (though when a change happens, like fighting the Vor for the first time, it is a breath of fresh air), it becomes highly repetitive. This repetitive gameplay just led to me putting the game down out of boredom. That means its not a game I can recommend, even though it has a lot going for it otherwise. Oh and you can't remap the keys. Come on people. Remapping keys should be super basic by now. Why is it always forgotten?

This is number one bullsh!t. Let's not talk about gameplay, and everything else that might be positive about this game. My save, which was fairly progressed, got deleted and replaced by an entirely different one, where I wasn't as far progressed and had ships I never posessed before.