Spaceland: Frontier

Full disclosure: I came to Spaceland: Frontier as someone who normally wants netcode latency charts and TTK breakdowns, not isometric alien-shooting on a grid. But Tortuga Team's base game won me over with something I respect in any genre - precision. The inputs are clean, the UI never fights you, and every decision on the grid actually matters. Frontier is a story expansion that drops returning cast members Jim, Terra, and Barret onto the desert planet Potatokon for what starts as a vacation. It does not stay a vacation. What you get here is eight new story battles set in that new desert environment, new enemy types to figure out, and a guest hero named Uncle Barney who rolls in armed with a revolver and the kind of old-man energy that makes the banter worth reading. More importantly, Jim, Terra, and Barret each pick up new abilities, which is the real mechanical hook. If you finished the base game and felt like your squad was capped out, Frontier opens that back up. The grid combat is still the same XCOM-adjacent action it always was - move your three-person squad, account for range modifiers, flank enemies that can only be hit from certain angles, and do not let anyone die unless you want a full restart. That last part has teeth. The honest negatives: eight missions is a short run. The base game was already criticized in some corners for late-game grind and repetition setting in around the 12-hour mark, and Frontier does not address any of that structural friction. It is additional story content built on the same foundation, so whatever you felt about mission pacing before is what you will feel here. There is also a note for controller players - there are reported input issues on certain platforms, worth checking the community forums before you commit. Co-op is listed as supported, which is a genuine plus for the genre; sitting down with someone on this style of tactics game is underrated. As a standalone purchase for someone new to Spaceland, this does not make sense - it requires the base game and works best if you have history with these characters. As an add-on for fans who cleared the original campaign and want more time with Barret and company in a new setting, it delivers exactly what it promises, no more.

Fred · Scout Team

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