Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers (Nintendo 3DS) Review

Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers comes with all the intimacy of Farmville, without all those nagging payments or graphics. Well, it costs money to buy, but after that, there's nothing to do but farm. There's no comfortable way around saying what needs to be said, so it's time to rip off the band aid. This game is just not very much fun.

The player will begin the tutorial by chopping logs. Every few seconds, those logs get added to a fund. This fund is pillaged to produce various buildings, all of which can be manned by one person. Repeat this over and over, and that's about the extent of the game. The player is told a festival is coming up, and if they're in the red, profit wise, they lose. This manages to be a bit difficult, so really the player just has to exist in front of the 3DS every so often to make more food or produce more wheat.

It is weird how there can only be one person per establishment, and that person can't be switched between jobs. That could be because it would allow a level of engagement this game simply doesn't offer. All in all, nothing ever feels important. While completing the tutorial will make the player feel a slight twinge of success, it quickly gives way to tedium. At least the game is pretty.

Okay, that was a lie. The structures look like they may be worthy of being put on stamps, but the empty, bald faces of the townsfolk manage to be boring and creepy at the same time. There's just nothing here worth writing home about. Sitting through the long wait times isn't all that bad, just because nothing lasts for hours at a time. Still, the waits feel more annoying because at the end, the player feels like they were left with a big pile of nothing. In short, imagine playing Minecraft, but remove all the creativity and challenge, and replace it with absolute monotony.