I reckon even Jim West would struggle in Nightmare Frontier.
As a fan of XCOM and its ilk, I found myself enjoying Hard West 2 rather a lot when I played it a few years back. It isn’t for everyone, but the combination of weird west shenanigans and turn-based tactical action were enjoyable to me. It’s nice to see the team back at it again with Nightmare Frontier, although this time they’re taking the ever popular rogue-like approach and are giving players a chance to have an early play with it through Early Access.
This being a rogue-like means that Nightmare Frontier‘s plot is somewhat lighter than the story heavy Hard West games, but there is one… of sorts. It seems this wild west city has gradually become infested with creatures called Dreadweavers that manifest as people’s fears to kill them. Your band of plucky gunslingers set out deeper and deeper into the city to find a way to stop them. There’s a little more to it than that, with the occasional bit of exposition about why you go to certain regions to find specific items, but in reality you’re heading out to find resources before returning with your crew hopefully intact.
The bulk of Nightmare Frontier takes place in small tactical missions that you’ll select from a map that will look very familiar to anyone that’s played Slay the Spire. Some nodes will be combat based, some will provide your crew with a limited time buff, whilst others will allow you to extract with your collected loot and crew members. There’s a risk-reward element to this, as you can press deeper into a raid to take on tougher battles for better loot, but at the risk of losing it all. Each raid doesn’t actually end, so you have to decide when it’s best to fall back for yourself.
Once you’re in combat, things aren’t dissimilar to Hard West and other grid-based tactical games. Each character gets to move and carry out an action, which is normally an attack of some sort. Sometimes you’ll get free actions based on what equipment they have. As you might expect, shooting and hitting tend to be your attacks, but there’s some serious thought to how you put all this into action. There are a lot of different combat options, but my favourite ones were those that would allow you to push enemies.
Pushing is such a powerful ability as if you drive a target into a wall or another enemy they’ll take additional damage. You can also drive them onto arena hazards like fire or explosives. This becomes increasingly important as battle difficulty increases due to the Overcome mechanic, which allows a character to get an extra action each time they kill an enemy. You won’t get extra movement though, so meleeing your way through a sea of monsters can be a very effective way of using your turn if you plan carefully. There have been more than a few battles that I completed without the enemies even getting a turn with careful use of this mechanic, and it’s incredibly satisfying when you can get everything just right.
As you progress through a raid, you’ll rescue new members for your crew, as well as weapons, items, and resources that you use back at base camp between runs. The characters you rescue can be of different quality, so you’ll probably find yourself switching up your crew between runs. Each one has a different class, meaning they can only equip specific weapons, but beyond that and some having more starting health than others there didn’t seem to be much difference between each. You won’t get attached to your squad like you do in something like XCOM and you’ll add and dismiss team members quite readily.
Upgrading weapons and items is the key way to gain power in Nightmare Frontier, and this isn’t a fast process. I found it took me quite a while to get much in the way of improved equipment, so I worry that the full game will be quite grindy as you head out on raids to get resources to upgrade so you can head out to get more. If grinding isn’t something you want from a game, you might want to wait until the final launch before giving this one a go.
Anyway, these upgrades start fairly simple, but can get you access to some powerful abilities. Guns will eventually let you weaken those that they hit or give an overwatch option instead of firing, whilst melee weapons will stack debuffs or drive enemies back further. This extends to equipment too, with backpacks giving you extra health or pocket knives that can trigger additional abilities in a single activation. You have to be careful when sending your crew out with these of course, because if you fail those items are lost forever.
You also need to be careful with which crew members you send out, but not because of the risk of loss. In what is probably my favourite inclusion in Nightmare Frontier, each party member has their own fear which will manifest in the battles you take them into. This means you can tailor your run to face the enemies you want to fight and have less of a random element. Do you find the self-healing Wendigo a pain to deal with? Then don’t take a party member that has a fear of Wendigo and they won’t turn up. Find the Creepy Puppet an easy foe? Take someone that’s afraid of them then. It’s a really neat system that I’d like to see more of. The downside is that as you rescue people on a run, something that can’t be avoided, you may rescue someone with a fear that you don’t want to deal with. On the other hand, this means that the variety of enemies you face increases ever more as you continue onwards.
Character fears scale as an area’s difficulty increases too. Nightmare Pressure rises when you end a turn, encouraging you to defeat enemies quickly and efficiently. When it hits certain thresholds, fears will become more dangerous. The fear of fire simply makes flames appear on the battlefield, but if the Nightmare Pressure levels up, you’ll start to see enemies with explosive cannons as weapons appearing, so you really do want to keep the pressure toned down as far as possible.
In terms of presentation, I have some quite varied thoughts. The music is fine but there’s so little variety to it that I got fed up with the battle theme very quickly. Sound effects are nice and chunky though, but again there’s little variety. The visuals are stronger, with lots of different enemy types to see, and a neat touch of the visual style becoming more and more twisted as the Nightmare Pressure ramps up. The characters are fairly generic though, and whilst I liked that giving a character a hat or backpack would change what their model looked like, I felt like they were all far too bland to become attached too. I’m also not a fan of the AI generated assets used for some of the images and 3D models. The devs are upfront about this, which I approve of, but I hope these are only placeholders and they get some actual art in these areas when the game is ready for a full release.
Nightmare Frontier is in a very good spot considering it’s still quite early in the Early Access process. There’s a solid game that fans of turn-based tactics will find a lot to sink their teeth into. The grinding element will be enough to put off some though, as will the rogue-like features that can cause you to lose a lot of your progress. If you can look past that and don’t mind the AI art in some places, then this will keep you entertained for some time.
Nightmare Frontier is available now in Steam Early Access.
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