Nightmare Frontier

The game's biggest innovation is its extraction mechanic. Instead of clearing every encounter, you're constantly weighing whether to push forward for more valuable loot or retreat before your squad is overwhelmed. As the [i]Nightmare Level[/i] rises, enemies become increasingly dangerous, but the rewards improve accordingly. This creates meaningful tension rarely seen in turn-based strategy games. Every decision carries weight, making successful extractions feel genuinely rewarding. The alternative early-1900s frontier setting gives [b]Nightmare Frontier[/b] a distinctive identity. Twisted streets, abandoned buildings, and grotesque monsters known as [i]Dreadweavers[/i] create an oppressive atmosphere that complements the tactical gameplay. The sound design deserves particular praise. Ambient effects and unsettling music maintain a constant sense of dread, even during quiet moments between battles. Rather than relying on flashy abilities, victory comes from careful planning and making efficient use of limited resources. The extraction system means avoiding unnecessary fights can be just as important as winning them. Procedurally generated expeditions, randomized loot, recruit management, and escalating difficulty provide strong replayability. Experimenting with different squad compositions and deciding when to extract keeps each expedition feeling unique, even if biome variety is currently somewhat limited. [b]Nightmare Frontier[/b] successfully combines tactical RPG combat with the high-stakes tension of extraction games, creating a formula that feels surprisingly original. Its atmosphere, strategic depth, and risk-versus-reward gameplay are compelling, although repetitive content prevent it from reaching its full potential. For fans of [i]XCOM[/i], [i]Darkest Dungeon[/i], or tactical roguelites looking for something different, [b]Nightmare Frontier[/b] is well worth playing and offers plenty of strategic satisfaction. [h1]8/10[/h1] DISASTER | BAD | MEDIOCRE | OKAY | GOOD | [b][u]GREAT[/u][/b] |AMAZING| MASTERPIECE [quote] Reviewed on: Win11 Home 64-bit, Intel i5-11600K, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB PRIME, 32GB DDR4-3600 RAM, 2 x Kingston NV1 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, Internet Broadband 1000/1000 Mbit[/quote] [quote] If you like this review, then please consider giving it a thumbs up. I've also reviewed other games that you might find interesting. If so please follow [u][url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/27418263/] Top of the Chart.[/url][/u]

This is a fantasy wild west themed tactics game with "extraction" elements built on the skeleton of their previous fantasy pirate themed roguelite tactics game Rogue Waters. The combat feels quite similar but with a larger focus on ranged attacks. The melee however is still of the variety where most attacks pushes both your character and the enemy they attack forward leading to some fun ways to hurt multiple enemies while also moving around without using up your movement points. One new addition that felt really cool at first but turned into the game's downfall is that whenever a character kills an enemy they regain an action point and can keep on going. Early on this was great fun when you managed to push enemies into positions that could let a single guy just barrel through them all with continuous thrusts of their sabre. Like I said however, this becomes the game's downfall because later on your characters will become extremely over powered to the point where you can sometimes beat battles with a single guy in the first turn. So many equipment and weapon upgrades just remove parts of the game. Like you can make yourself "engagement immune" which means you don't have to worry about getting married... I mean getting stuck on enemies, which would reduce your movement range. You get it so bullets aren't blocked by obstacles so you can shoot anything on the map, upgrades like these and others that just remove tactical considerations and make the game feel super easy. It wouldn't have been so bad if you could just get one per character maybe, but you can have it all on everyone since it's a game all about items rather than stat upgrades from leveling them up. And once you can beat every single enemy on a map on the first turn effortlessly, then systems like debuffing also become completely irrelevant. Are there some enemies that counter these upgrades? Yes, but not only are they too weak to make much of a difference, but since you choose which enemies to face (since only the enemies your squad mates fear appear) you don't even have to encounter them once you learn about them. Now I also put the word "extraction" in quotation marks because it doesn't have the one thing from extraction games like Tarkov that would have removed most bad things about the game... You don't lose the equipment you went into the level with if you die, only the stuff you found there. So the overpowered equipment that ruin the game after a while will be yours forever, you only ever grow stronger, while enemies strength is basically chosen by the player, to be fair, it didn't even matter when my characters got OP, they could mush most fights even on the highest nightmare level. You also don't lose your characters, but like I said, they don't have stuff that progress other than the equipment so who even cares. The game in fact became so routine by this point that when I unlocked the final area I just turned up the game speed to 8x (which looks terrible, all animations are sped up, not just the gameplay so the constant dust storms just become noise all over the screen.) Together with this hugely flawed system that makes the game super easy after a while in the most extreme example of an inverted difficulty curve I've ever seen, there's also some other negatives. Around the 15 hour mark the game started freezing, not super often, but often enough to be annoying. The game saves after almost every turn of battle so it's not a huge deal but it wastes your time. Sometimes the freezing just affected the game, sometimes the entire computer, not sure why, but the kind that just affected the game usually happened when using a certain weapon, the "Ethereal Buckshot IV". The game re-uses a lot of icons from Rogue Waters, some of which are fine but some others don't really fit thematically. A bigger art issue is that some inventory items use AI art, which on itself kinda sucks since it looks bad but whatever, but it also leads to two problems, the first being that the artstyle is inconsistent and the second that some art don't even fit the weapons description, like multi-barrel guns often have different amounts of barrels compared to the amounts of ammo they can use. There's also some stuff to do with animations that seem unfinished and/or half-assed. Since I'd grown bored with the game at 25.8 hours I decided not to finish it until full release (I played during the final beta release) just so I could see if they fixed things... Well, turns out they decided to do a save wipe, hooray!!!!......... Screw this game.

On the positive side: I did like the art style, the way the story is told and, for some time, the battles. But the battles becomes very repetitive very fast and the gain for each run is very minimal. The last bit of enthusiasm was killed by a bug that prevented me from interacting with the generator - when I went back to menu and reloaded the save state, the game spawned 6-8 new enemies that killed my 30 minute run instantly. I really hate loosing playtime by bugs, so the thumb finally goes down.

More of a puzzle than a tactical game. Maps are too small. Controls are unreliable for some reason.

После Hard West 2 (и даже 1) это ОГРОМНЫЙ шаг назад, а то и все 10! Деградация и даунгрейд в асболютно каждом аспекте, кроме разве что количества шмота, что можно на себя надеть. Ощущение, что эта игра вышла года на 4 раньше, а не наоборот. Отдельный минус за одну из худшиу ру-локализаций, что я видел в 20-ых.

I'm 40 hours in and its been fun. Its a tactical puzzler, with combos, chain attacks and gear progression. The graphics, sound and terrain art is stunning and slick. There is a lot that could be done to make the game better: Bigger more tactical maps where movement and cover mean something - the current small maps mean most monsters can move anywhere on the map and spank you, and vice versa. More granularity in the nightmare progression. Its scales up fast to being deadly in a few turns with monsters jacking it up as well. The buffs the monsters get really amplify and wipe you out like a flipped switch from under control to getting massacred. Farming the materials to progress past China town has me locked for the last ten hours, trying to get a combo of characters with the right fears, building up enough power to survive the required nightmare level, then RNG for the monster appearing, then RNG for it to drop its part, and now I need 20.... I probably am going to dip out the game after no progress for the last ten hours. A few quality of life ideas for the devs: Arrow keys moving the map (not just WASD) Not locking the UI during animations so I can scroll to the next guy while effects are popping A few more professions would add a lot (medicine man, Judge, Sherriff etc) More quests would be cool as well. In summary, its 30-40 hours of game play for the admission price, so I think its a good deal for fans of turn based tactical extraction looters.

Game devs lie about AI Generated content being in the game claiming it "isn't true anymore" despite multiple callouts. They just lock the threads about it. Game devs also will misread and lock threads on the discussions then claim it was to "protect users from steam moderators" when in reality they just don't want threads up where people criticize their actions. Refunded it because the early story writing is awful (I didn't get very far beyond it) and instead of actually letting the player learn how to play the game they overload you with 500 tutorials in the first 30 minutes that are all poorly written. The developer uses AI in many areas but at least they admit to AI translation. If it wasn't obvious by how poorly things are written in the game and how poorly they read peoples posts on their forums.

Dont buy this. Its just bad and repetative game. its a demo which was promoted to release through unholly purgatory.