The developers at Ice Code Games are looking to create a new genre with their latest game, Nightmare Frontier. Out now in Early Access, Nightmare Frontier is being coined the first-ever Tactical Extraction Looter.
We got a chance to try it out. Let’s jump in and take a look at what they have to offer so far in Early Access.
In this preview, I will be going over the following topics.
Story
People’s nightmares are manifesting into Dreadweavers and terrorizing the town. However, that doesn’t stop your crew of scavengers from going in to loot what’s left.
It’s going to take all your courage to get in and out alive because the Dreadweavers are coming for you, and they look like your worst nightmare. Will you be able to make it out alive with all the best loot in this alternative 1900s western town?
Gameplay
The main focus in Nightmare Frontier is to go on as many successful raids as you can. You want to go into a district, loot as much as you can, and get back out while you still have someone alive on your crew.
If you don’t make it out alive, then you lose everything from that raid and have to try again.
City Map
There are two kinds of maps in Nightmare Frontier. You have the city map and the raid map. We will talk about the raid map in a little bit.
The city map, though, is your safe haven. This is where you want to extract to when your bags are full during a raid. It is also where you can freely manage your crew and your equipment.
Scavengers
During your raids, you will come across scavengers who will join your party. They have a range of different classes, such as Chopper, Sharpshooter, and Brawler.
The only real difference between the classes, other than appearance, is the weapon type that they can equip.
So, the Chopper can only equip a cleaver, and the Sharpshooter can only equip a rifle. Hopefully there will be some additional content, such as abilities, that will differentiate the classes more from one another at full release.
Equipment
As you collect items during your raids, you will be able to equip them for the scavengers in your party. The only equipment restriction is their weapon; otherwise, you are free to mix and match gear like boots, hats, and pocket items to best fit your play style.
If a character gets knocked out in a battle, you can even swap all their gear over to someone else in the party that you might have just picked up. This allows you always to use your best gear regardless of what characters might be available for the coming combat.
The other important thing that you will be picking up during your raids is upgrade items. You will use these items to upgrade your equipment once you are back at the City Map.
Rather than your characters leveling up to get new abilities, you upgrade your equipment to unlock new abilities for that specific item.
It could be as simple as providing the wearer an additional point of health, or it can add a completely new ability to that item, such as upgrading the rifle to have a bayonet so that you can stab enemies from two tiles away.
Fears
One of the other things that makes each of your characters different from each other is their fears. The Dreadweavers thrive on the fears of your characters.
These fears determine what the Dreadweavers will manifest into during combat. Having a wide range of fears can sometimes make your raids more difficult.
As you get farther in your raids, your characters will become more fearful, and the Nightmare Level will increase.
The fears of your characters will determine what bonuses the enemies have at each level. For example, Fear of Spiders will spawn Gunspiders at Level 1, and all enemies will gain Vulnerable Strike at Level 4.
The best way to keep your Nightmare Level at a manageable spot is to try to explrore nodes that will decrease the level during your raid.
Raids
Raids are the core of Nightmare Frontier. After all, this is a tactical extraction looter. What does that mean exactly?
Well, extraction looter games are built around pushing your luck to loot as much as you can without dying. If you can survive long enough, then you might get some really good loot.
However, you don’t get to keep any of it unless you can make it to an extraction point and return home safely. If your party dies before extraction, then you get nothing.
Nightmare Frontier mixes this extraction looter system with tactical turn-based combat. When you go into a raid, you will be greeted by a familiar spiderweb-style map, like you see in most roguelite games.
There is a range of nodes that you will have to pick from. Some are healing or buffs for your party. Most are combat nodes, though.
Few and far between are the extraction nodes, so you will want to keep an eye out for those. Highlighting a node adjacent to your location will show you a preview of the reward for visiting that node.
You can scroll up the map a few nodes to try to plan out your route, but you cannot preview any of the rewards for those future nodes.
Combat
The combat system is very similar to the developer’s previous game, Rogue Waters. There is a lot of mobility and positioning in combat because every punch pushes your enemy backwards and your character advances forwards.
This is something that can take some getting used to if you haven’t played their previous game. You can easily put your characters out of position by doing a melee attack, which moves both you and your opponent one space.
Now, your character might have moved into a bad position, or you pushed the enemy out of line of sight of one of your other characters. Luckily, there is an undo button, so you are free to experiment and test things out.
Once you get used to how the melee combat works, though, you can pull off some pretty great combos. Knocking an enemy into an object or another enemy does additional damage.
You can also knock them back into environmental hazards like exploding barrels. Just keep in mind that the enemy can do the same to you, and they will. So, try to always end your turn in the best position possible.
There is something else to keep in mind while you are combo-ing all of your character attacks for maximum damage. Each time a character gets a kill, their turn resets.
This means that they get a free turn to try to take out another enemy. However, this does not reset all of their abilities. Most pocket items are one-time use per battle, and guns have limited ammo.
Characters also only get one movement action per turn. So, keep that in mind and try to have the scavenger who can best utilize the free turn be the one to get the kill.
Conclusion
There is quite a bit of content already for Nightmare Frontier in Early Access. That doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement, though. The developers have a roadmap posted on their Steam page for future content. We will have to see how much this additional content improves the game.
I enjoyed the developer’s previous game, and I can see a lot of similarities here. I think the idea of mixing a looter shooter with turn-based tactics is an interesting concept. I am excited to see where this one goes.
If you are interested in keeping an eye on this one, feel free to go check out their Steam page. You can join the Early Access or even try out the demo.
The developers at Ice Code Games provided a key for this preview.
