- 3RD-STRIKE.COM - A La Une - 16/Aug 00:01

Nightmare Frontier – Preview

Sometimes, the best games emerge from a combination of genres. In the case of Nightmare Frontier, the first self-published title developed by Ice Code Games, we have a mix of tactical turn-based strategy mechanics and extraction looter gameplay. Throw some roguelike elements on top, and we can certainly say that this game, currently in Early Access, offers a satisfying blend of play we haven’t seen before. However, there are definitely some pieces still missing in this puzzle. Let’s dive straight into the nightmare. Nightmare Frontier is set in a world where nightmares have come to life, literally! The monsters unleashed upon the world are called Dreadweavers, taking a person’s greatest fear and making it a reality. The survivors are driven out of the city and struggle to get by, but those old bustling streets are still bursting with loot. So it’s up to you to put together a brave team of adventurers that will dare to venture back into the city. While the characters you pick will dictate the enemies you fight (more on that below), there is next to no individual lore for them. Most of the story is delivered in huge swaths of text you can choose to skip if so desired. In this Early Access version, the game also doesn’t have a true conclusion, since those parts of the story haven’t been put in yet. The graphics of this game are a bit of a mixed bag for us. From the simple UI to the isometric view, and the character designs, we’d say these graphics feel like the ones you find in a mobile game. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, simplicity is key. And we can tell Nightmare Frontier is trying to put gameplay at the forefront of the experience. But here or there, we would have really loved to see more details in the released project. On the other hand, the art style itself and the monster designs are very pleasing. The soundtrack suffers from a similar problem, in our opinion. While we don’t want to call the music bad, the tracks can be repetitive, and we didn’t find any of them memorable, not even during combat when the music usually should kick things into next gear. The game is full of stock asset sound effects and no proper voice acting or dialogue. We found everything just serviceable enough, but it ends up giving everything a sort of low-effort vibe that we don’t completely hate but also can’t compliment. Nightmare Frontier is a self-declared tactical extraction looter. If you’re not aware, extraction looters are games with a risk-and-reward system, where the player needs to choose whether they want to end their run prematurely and return to the base with all their loot, or risk pushing onward. If you die, you lose all the stuff you have gathered, so you constantly have to judge if it’s worth it when the difficulty keeps ramping up. The roguelike elements come in when you consider that ending a run and taking your loot home means you’ll be more prepared when starting the next run. This means you’re a little more geared out every time you start, and get a little bit further through the map every time too. While these mechanics are important in Nightmare Frontier, the main star of the game is the turn-based combat. Your team consists of three members, each with their own weapons and related skills. As in most games, you start your run by picking a location that you can traverse through by going through a roadmap of different encounters, with branches sometimes giving you various options. The most important encounters are those where you fight the Dreadweavers. On the grid-like map of the game, you face off against a collection of enemies in turn-based combat. This combat is snappy and intuitive, something we really enjoyed. The environment is littered with interactable objects that can do damage to enemies when you push them into those, but pushing the enemy into one of your team members also has consequences. As you progress through the game and upgrade your team’s weapons, the difficulty level gradually increases, making for a satisfying, scaled experience where the combat stays fun and challenging. As mentioned before, risk also plays a factor here, since death means losing all your loot. Other encounters on the map can have various effects, such as healing your members or adding new characters to the roster. The devs are planning to add a proper conclusion with a boss battle, as well as a crafting system and other new novelties for what you can do in between runs. We think this would be a great addition, since right now the characters are kind of the same, with just the weapons being swapped out. While a character’s specific fear does dictate what monsters you’ll run into, you cannot upgrade a specific character, and progress feels a little stagnant after a while. Conclusion Nightmare Frontier does best when it’s delivering on the tactical turn-based combat it promises, and in that regard, we have no complaints. It’s only the dress-up around said combat which we’d like to see expanded on and fleshed out more, but that’s exactly what an Early Access period is for, of course. With that in mind, this is definitely a game to keep your eye on.