Simulation games have become a rare thing on consoles. Luckily, Arc System Works has released New Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers as a launch game for Nintendo Switch. But is this town builder good enough to bring the genre back to consoles?
Expand your town
New Frontier Days gives you the option to play three different modes: Story, Survival and Free mode. Story mode is basically a stretched out tutorial that advances a simple story. Survival mode lets you pick one out of five difficulty levels and challenges you to survive as long as possible. Then there is Free mode, which doesn’t have game overs and gives you unlimited Invention Cards, which basically are temporary boosts or upgrades.
The gameplay consists out of gathering resources and expanding your town with buildings. You do this by assigning your pioneers to different kinds of jobs, like fishing and lumbering. Gathered resources can be sold or refined into different resources. The more resources and money you have, the bigger your town can get. If this is reminding you of Farmville, then you are correct to do so because this game feels a lot like a free-to-play mobile game.
Nothing to offer
To be clear, New Frontier Days is not a ported mobile game but a uniquely developed launch title for the Switch. But instead of making a fun or immersive game, the developers decided to look at free-to-play games for mobile platforms and copy them. The gameplay in New Frontier Days is one big grind and doesn’t have an actual goal. All you need to do is expand your town and complete some challenges. There’s also no way to ‘lose’ the game. Yes, you can go bankrupt but the game is so forgiving that you actually have to put effort into it.
Even the visual design of the game looks like it’s taken straight from Facebook games. It’s pretty colorful, yes, but your screen is filled with al kinds of buttons and texts. Luckily, you can hide some of it, although it would have been nice to be able to disable everything of the UI.
Conclusion
New Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers is not a game worth buying unless you are a big fan of Farmville and other Facebook games. A game like this doesn’t belong on a console and it’s actually shocking that Nintendo thought this was a good enough title to launch together with their newest console.
