Farworld Pioneers, by developer Igloosoft and publisher tinyBuild, is another excellent entry into the survival/craft/build genre, simply known most times as the “sandbox” genre. Beginning as many classics in the sci-fi genre, your ship has suffered massive failures, necessitating the call to abandon ship. You and your best buddy, Buddy (what a guy!) have crashed landed on the local planet in your escape pod. Now begins the fight for survival, as you and Buddy begin building shelter, collecting resources, and crafting tools and weapons in order to survive and find all of your friends. What better quest to have then to find a way to get off this crazy rock and get back home?!
The gameplay is similar to others in the genre such as Terrarria – a 2-D sidescroller where the sky, and the planet’s core, is the limit. I do not have the most experience in the genre, however something I think that stuck out was the way that you can control your colonists to help you build, craft, or otherwise survive in the world, in various climates. The keyboard mapping took me a little time to get used to. While the introduction and tutorial are useful, I think I was a bit too rock-brained to get it the first time and restarted in order to review it. Essentially the O and L buttons map your different craft and resource menus in order to build or give orders to your colonists to build. Once you get the hang of it, things begin to flow more.
Definite care has been put into the weapons. Aside from melee weapons which function as you’d expect, the gunplay feels fun to play with. I am always a sucker for detailed reload animations, and I was hooked from the beginning with how the starting revolver needed to be loaded. My only gripe is that you definitely need to be wary of where you are aiming – it can be very exact to hit an enemy’s hitbox, and for this reason, I highly recommend using the mouse and keyboard rather than a controller, you will just have a much better time.
My biggest enjoyment of the game came from how gloriously they were inspired by the graphic adventure and other genre-mixing games of developers like Lucasarts and Monolith from the 1980s and 1990s. From the initial developer title screen and well into the game, it felt like a loving homage to that time in gaming. The detailed and animated image of Buddy in the menus immediately made me think that the developers were huge fans of Tie Fighter from back in the day. I could almost hear the Imperial officer giving me orders. The buddy system with Buddy also reminded me of Ellen Ripley and Bishop from Aliens, which was even funnier as my character spawned in with a bald head like in Alien3. These are the kind of things that always give me a smile and make me notice the care the developers put into it.
Overall, Farworld Pioneers is another excellent entry into the genre that will surely only improve with future updates as is typical with games in the sandbox genre. The homage to the classics gives it a great standing out point in regard to its contemporaries, and I am sure fans of the genre will find much to enjoy.
Score: 8.5/10
Farworld Pioneers is available for PC via Steam.
Related: Reviews by Matt O’Toole
Your local neighborhood nutjob, gamer, and teacher! I'm an avid fan of many genres such as platformers, shooters, horror, etc. I am also an avid tabletop gamer - hugely into the worlds of Warhammer and all of their spinoffs. I'm a big believer in being objective - even if something is not my cup of tea, I want to talk about it on the objective level - is it well made, crafted with love, and with care for the fans? If so, that's a good game in my book for someone and well worth their hard earned dollarydoos!
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