Frontier Legends Review

An ambitious frontier survival experience filled with crafting, exploration, and settlement building, but its Early Access launch comes with quite a few issues.

There's something instantly appealing about a survival game set in the Wild West. But Frontier Legends offers a different kind of adventure, transporting players to the rugged American frontier rather than to the world of zombies, fantasy kingdoms, or other worlds. 

In Frontier Legends, players must build a home, raise horses, gather food, and make a life in an untamed region. It's a setting that hasn't been explored nearly as much as other survival genres, which makes the game feel fresh before you even press start.

That fresh setting is exactly what has drawn attention to Frontier Legends. But since its Early Access launch, the conversation hasn't been focused solely on cowboys and frontier adventures. The game has faced heavy criticism from players over its use of AI-generated assets, while others argue that the bigger problem is simply how unfinished the overall experience feels.

The real question is simple: if you ignore the controversy, is there still a fun survival game underneath? Right now, the answer is a mix of promise and frustration. Frontier Legends doesn't tell a grand cinematic story. Instead, it throws players into an open world and lets them figure things out for themselves.

That approach isn't necessarily a bad thing.

There are many survival games that let players build their own experiences rather than follow a predetermined storyline. The trouble is, Frontier Legends doesn’t really offer gamers enough fascinating reasons to keep progressing.

Even the developers recognize that the current single-player option lacks much of its narrative material. There are minimal questlines, little NPC interaction and not much story to be found. The few quests that do exist aren't particularly exciting either. Early on, players are asked to gather hundreds of berries or manually craft hundreds of pieces of cloth.

These missions feel more like busy work to extend gameplay than to foster discovery or teach new ideas. It's the kind of progression that makes players ask, "Am I surviving the Wild West, or just doing busywork?" Hopefully, future updates will flesh out the world with better characters and meaningful quests because the setting certainly deserves it. 

At its heart, Frontier Legends sticks closely to the survival formula. You'll spend most of your time chopping trees, mining rocks, collecting berries, hunting animals, crafting equipment, and slowly building a settlement of your own. If you've played survival games before, you'll feel at home almost immediately.

players unlock new buildings, tools, workstations, and eventually the ability to hire NPC workers who automatically gather materials like wood and ore. This is easily one of the game's strongest ideas because it makes all the early grinding feel like it's building toward something useful.

Watching a small camp slowly grow into a working settlement is satisfying.

Unfortunately, getting there isn't always smooth. One of the biggest problems is how little the game explains. Horse taming is a perfect example. Catching a wild horse sounds exciting, but the process mostly involves pressing the feed button until a progress bar reaches 100 percent.

Then comes another surprise. Once the horse is finally yours, the game never explains where to find a saddle. Players are left wandering between buildings until they eventually discover one being sold by a trader at the train station. Moments like this happen constantly.

Need a land permit? Figure it out yourself. Trying to place furniture? Good luck. Wondering why your building suddenly won't place? It could be a bug—or maybe not. Instead of rewarding curiosity, Frontier Legends often leaves players confused simply because important information isn't communicated.

Combat is another area where the game feels unfinished. Wildlife is everywhere, but hunting isn't nearly as satisfying as it should be. What's with tiny rabbits surviving several arrows, but then bigger creatures like bison taking an astonishing amount of damage and ultimately keeling over?

Even stranger, the AI can be surprisingly easy to exploit.

Simply moving sideways while firing arrows is often enough to avoid getting hit altogether. Once players discover this trick, hunting quickly loses any real challenge. Human enemies create a different kind of frustration.

Bandits carrying pistols appear throughout the world and immediately attack players on sight. The bow, which works reasonably well against animals, suddenly feels almost useless against armed enemies because every time players take damage, their shot gets interrupted.

To make matters worse, the game doesn't clearly identify who is friendly and who isn't. Sometimes the only way to know is when someone starts shooting. Combat has the ingredients to become enjoyable, but right now it lacks the polish needed to make encounters feel rewarding.

Survival mechanics are supposed to immerse players in the harsh realities of frontier life. Instead, they occasionally raise more questions than they answer. Take water, for example. Players can't drink directly from the massive freshwater lakes scattered across the map.

Even after building a water well at their own base, they still can't drink from it. Instead, they first need to craft a water skin before they can actually use the water. Oddly enough, collecting berries often becomes the easier solution because they restore both hunger and thirst.

Little design choices like these don't make survival more realistic.

They simply make it more awkward. Progression follows the familiar survival formula of gathering resources, unlocking recipes, and improving equipment. Later on, automation through hired workers becomes genuinely rewarding, but the road leading there is packed with repetitive tasks that can wear players down long before the interesting systems appear.

Grinding has always been part of survival games. The difference is that good survival games make that grind feel meaningful. Frontier Legends hasn't quite found that balance yet. The game's visuals are a bit of a mixed bag. The world itself looks surprisingly nice.

Wide open plains, trees, rivers, rocky hills and variable weather help make a convincing frontier atmosphere. Riding through such places may be rather relaxing, in fact, especially around sunrise or sunset.” Often, the scenery manages to sell the fantasy. Character models and animations, though, do not always meet that standard.

Some movements feel stiff, and technology issues sometimes interrupt immersion. The continuing dispute over AI-generated assets has dominated online attention. The greater concern is that the whole presentation still feels unfinished. A beautiful world can only carry a game so far if the systems underneath keep getting in the way.

One area where Frontier Legends performs surprisingly well is its audio. The soundtrack suits the scenario well, moving from peaceful, Western-inspired songs during exploration to more intense tracks when danger is present. The world also comes alive with ambient sounds.

Birds, wildlife, and natural impacts offer a compelling sensation of being out in the bush. 

But the NPC language can get a bit stale after a while, with the merchants and townsfolk all saying the same things over and over again. It's a small issue, but one that reminds players just how early in development the game still is. Frontier Legends has all the ingredients for a memorable survival adventure.

A Wild West setting, settlement building, horse taming, exploration, hunting, crafting, and automated workers sound like the perfect combination for fans of the genre. The problem isn't the ideas. The problem is the execution.

Nearly every exciting feature is held back by missing tutorials, repetitive quests, clunky combat, technical bugs, and systems that often leave players guessing instead of playing. Still, it's hard to completely write the game off.

Many successful Early Access games started rough and became great games over the years with updates and user feedback. Frontier Legends could absolutely follow that path.

Right now, though, it feels more like a promising blueprint than a finished adventure. There's definitely a good game hiding somewhere beneath the rough edges. The only question is whether future updates can uncover it before players decide to ride off into the sunset.