The main issue I have with The Front is that it is very boring; unlike titles such as Conan Exiles, Ark Survival Evolved/Ascended and more recently, Soulmask, The Front offers very little in the way of challenging PvE content. Most enemies have some of the worst AI I have ever seen, making fighting them laughably easy and yet somehow ridiculously dull at the same time due to their low-level IQ and relatively large health bars.
While this alone would not be enough to make it boring, as well-polished combat mechanics can partially mitigate the boredom caused by NPC bullet sponges with terrible AI, The Front’s combat system is frankly terrible and feels like a cut-and-paste basic Unreal Engine combat script with very few enhancements or changes.
Nothing feels impactful, a problem that affects both weapons and tools.
It doesn’t matter if you are hitting an NPC, another player, a wild animal, or a tree; you do not feel like you are doing anything with each swing; rather, after a set amount of damage, the enemy dies, the tree falls, or the rock vanishes.
Image credit Armored Core: Formula Front - Extreme Battle - Published and developed by FromSoftware.
The kindest thing that could be said about The Front is that if the developers intended it to be a worse version of Rust with marginally better visuals and a few mechanics inspired by other games, they succeeded.
That being said, The Front feels older and less polished than a decade-old alpha build of Rust despite having fairly decent, if not dated, and often mismatched asset store visuals of varying theme and quality.
One thing that I find particularly baffling about The Front is that it looks like a low-budget Unity engine asset flip and even plays like one despite running on Unreal Engine 4, a very good engine that powers some of the best games in the survival genre.
Don’t get me wrong, Unity is a great game engine, and in the hands of talented developers, it can result in some pretty amazing titles.
Yet there have been far too many low-quality survival games made with store-bought assets and a free version of Unity Engine, which has resulted in Unity’s less-than-favourable reputation in the genre. This is ultimately unwarranted and unfortunate, blighting the reputation of what is otherwise a very solid engine (recent drama notwithstanding).
While The Front is slightly better than the worst examples of that unfortunate sub-genre, it comes close to the bottom of the barrel of what the survival genre has to offer.
For that reason, I cannot recommend anyone purchase The Front in good conscience, nor will I be playing it any further unless something drastically changes.
Image credit Armored Core: Formula Front - Extreme Battle - Published and developed by FromSoftware.
Armored Core: Formula Front - Extreme Battle is a survival video game developed and published by FromSoftware, it was released on 17 November 2005 and retails for $19.99.
Armored Core: Formula Front - Extreme Battle is available exclusively on PC.
As of September 2024, around 5,000 people play Armored Core: Formula Front - Extreme Battle on a fairly regular basis.
Armored Core: Formula Front - Extreme Battle is barely active, and while a few players continue to log in regularly, finding an active server is difficult and may require playing on a server with very high latency.
The Front offers the following matchmaking options:
The following peripherals are officially supported:
The Front is unrated and contains:
Image credit Armored Core: Formula Front - Extreme Battle - Published and developed by FromSoftware.
The Front is not terrible, but that is the best thing I could say about it; while it does allow players a fair bit of freedom when it comes to how they wish to play, and the addition of vehicles is nice, let’s not kid ourselves, it is a moderately high-quality asset flip, but an asset flip none the less.
While I understand indie developers cannot always afford to spend the type of money required to avoid asset stores entirely (nor should they have to), when almost every asset is from an asset pack, and the core game mechanics appear to be lifted directly from a survival game starter project/kit, there is very little to get excited about, a big part of the reason why The Front is essentially dead, despite being affordably priced and launching to decent numbers (peaking at just shy of 20k on Steam).
Overall not the worst game you will ever play, but it is a barely average game in a genre that is overflowing with excellent titles, and while it is affordably priced, I could not say that it offers good value for money, as frankly, while there is a lot of content, it is often very low quality and overall feels like a mismatch of things done better elsewhere,e held together with asset store packs and prewritten scripts, with only scant amounts of new code to hold it all together.
