Lightspeed Frontier Preview

If Space Engineers and Rebel Galaxy devs got drunk at a party and slept together, Lightspeed Frontier would be the baby born nine months after the fact. A space adventure title focused on both shipbuilding and space adventuring in equal measures, Lightspeed Frontier is an interesting little game with a long way to go.

And maybe boldly go where no game has gone before.

Lightspeed Frontier revolves around controlling a buildable space craft and adventuring in a free-form galaxy, and you customise your ship piece by piece by dragging and dropping blocks onto a command pod, which is a self sustained little craft capable of flight and warp travel. The building blocks involve anything from armour and sensors to weapons, engines, and shields, and act as modules greatly enhancing the size and functionality of your ship. In the event of a catastrophic destruction, this command pod even acts as escape pod of sorts, allowing you to fly back to a nearby space station and build a new ship.

This modular build model is clearly the foundation of the game, and it seems to work pretty well. You have a nice initial selection of blocks arranged around three different overall “block designs” from three different factions, allowing you to create the ships pretty much however you want. The only limitation seems to be money, so the more you play, the more money you get, the bigger your ship can become. However, the building system is not yet perfect, and it could use some polishing. The current drag and drop system is too imprecise and relaxed, making the experience of building a ship feel a bit loose. The camera is slightly restrictive, not being precisely free-orbiting but using an horizontal axis as guidance. And the blocks, while containing a nice variety, do not contain nearly enough shapes and sizes; I tried building a space aircraft carrier but there were no broad blocks, meaning I had to use dozens of narrow 4x1 blocks to make up the bulk of my ship. The lack of a copy and paste function made the endeavour decisively boring, to say the least.

It is downright maddening picking up the pieces every time a ship explodes.

Another nice idea not exactly well executed is the quest system, meant to be given to you via breaking news in huge plasma screens on space stations. In theory, this means an organic storytelling method; in practice, it means strafing around the space station like a space crab looking for a purple space TV. The quest log itself could use some work, being simple to a fault, working just as a simple message and being wholly unappealing. In fact, while cute, the whole interface system could use more functionality and polishment.

The universe itself, however, is amazing. Space stations look cool, the playable areas are quite big -- both the sector and galaxy maps -- and the variety of astral phenomena is amazing. In my first 15 minutes with the Lightspeed Frontier, I ran across planets, yellow suns, red suns, white suns, and even pulsars. It is always refreshing to see a space game focus on space bodies instead of just using the theme as a skin. On a similar note, you can notice the developers have put a lot of effort into designing parodies of real life companies and figures like Coca-Cola and President Trump, giving the title some personality and a nice vibe that sets it apart from the rest. Even loading screens have little jokes in them that are actually funny.

The space stations are oddly attractive, but you can't really do anything to them.

The gameplay is a mixed bag. On one hand, I like the freedom given to players of choosing when to engage and drop out of warp speed, including the ability to accelerate and slow down -- a lot of titles go the simplistic route, which ends up dumbing down the whole mechanic. On the other, the combat is a mixed bag, lacking punch at the same time it feels too fragile -- I lost count of how many times I seemed to be pounding an enemy ship to oblivion just to simply evaporate and respawn half a second later. The feedback is lacking and ships don’t really break apart the way they should, instead just soaking up damage on a percentual basis until 100% is reached and crafts go boom -- it feels like a missed opportunity given the modular design that lies at the heart of gameplay and progression. Hopefully, player’s health will be rebalanced to be more resilient and we’ll be allowed to ram ships and break them apart into pieces with weapons fire.

In the end, Lightspeed Frontier is a nice little title with a lot of potential. If you fancy supporting the developers and buying it, keep in mind it is in Early Access -- it does need polish and work, but I didn’t experienced any significant bugs and the core of the game is quite good. The developers appear to be active in the community, and the ideas present in the title are strong enough to carry it into the future. If you enjoy building ships and like the premise of this game, I definitely recommend you keep an eye on Lightspeed Frontier.