[dropcap]F[/dropcap]rontier Days: Founding Pioneers is a town building simulation game, with a lot of attention to detail. The game lets you be the creator of a whole new world. Build, decorate and manage your very own village. It is up to you, to colonize the new land, feed your pioneers and create a thriving community. An  endless amount of customizations, buildings, and things to do will make you keep coming back to the game. We are taking a first in-depth look at Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers on Nintendo Switch.

Getting Started

The first thing you may notice, is how complex this game really is. The level of depth, and customizations are a truly welcome surprise. And once you jump into the story mode, you are greeted by Jessica who will provide a wonderfully detailed tutorial that will teach you the necessary mechanics to feel right at home. The controls and UI are very easy to navigate, given that Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers is the first Nintendo Switch game fully utilizing the touchscreen functionality. In handheld mode, we often found ourselves jumping between joy-con and touchscreen controls, taking the best out of two. This was especially useful later on in the game when we had more pioneers to mange, assigning a task was done very quickly with only a few tabs on the screen. Placing a new building for instance, was a lot more accurate and easier using the joy-cons.

Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers captures the core elements of City building simulations like Sim City, Civilization or Cities: Skyline. But what puts a heartwarming twist on this game, are the pioneers. Once you start putting your people to work, you will also begin to feel strangely attached to everyone living in your little ant farm. It is your responsibility to take care of every pioneer you invite into your town. Every person will have to have a purpose. You can assign different occupations that will help advance the town and benefit one another. Some pioneers will need to do farming others do fishing – to produce enough food to fill everyones tummy. Others may need to cut down trees and mine rocks. Resources are needed to place new buildings, and decorations. It seems that there is always something to do, and the shortage of pioneers you will experience in the beginning will have you struggle on where you want to put your people first. As by the end of each year you are faced with a hefty bill for buildings upkeep and more, you will want to make sure to generate enough money from your farms, markets etc. to keep your head above water.

Building your Town

Every building in the game that produces resources such as the sawmill that can output logs, will also generate trash in the town. Even though this is not a big problem at the early stage of your village, as your town becomes bigger, your pioneers will feel increasingly unhappy living in a dirty town. You can boost their happiness by creating a beautiful looking city, place paths, and decorations to enhance the look and feel of your village. You will also be able to place a recycling center helping to get rid of all the garbage. A stunning looking village will not only be eye candy for you, the player, but your people will thank you as well. Happy pioneers are more productive!

The world map is big enough to not be concerned about placing your buildings as tight as possible. Getting from your town center to the sheep herd outside your town can take a while. Luckily you can have pets and horses that can help you complete your activities faster and more efficient. A horse can help you harvest a field faster, or you can ride it to get around places even quicker. But there is more than just horses, you can make any wild animal your pet. While you explore your world, you will encounter sheep, bears, pigs and more. Every animal in Frontier Days has a purpose to it’s existence. Sheep will provide you with cotton, that can be turned into yarn, using the weaver building you have placed in your town.

Quest, Achievements and more ..

Throughout the story mode you will be challenged with many quests. Each quest asks you to accomplish a certain goal. Place new buildings, mine 20 ore, or harvest 10 fields just to name a few. Upon successful completion of your quest, you can earn useful rewards. Some will spoil you with hundreds of gold coins, others will hand you some resources. The real treat however, are the “Invention Cards” these cards can be a life saver. Every card comes with a special perk, like making your fields more productive, or increasing the resell value of certain resources.  You can use these cards whenever you need them the most, there is no obligation to play them the moment you earn them.

There are also dozens of achievement to earn. These will keep you motivated to challenge yourself in the game. The system works similar to what you may be used to from other games and platforms similar to the trophy system on Playstation 4 and Xbox One. It is straight forward, simple and a lot of fun.

Don’t Underestimate the Music

Every fan town building games knows how important the background music really is. You will essentially listen to it for hours at time. An annoying soundtrack can ruin the entire experience, no matter how good the gameplay is. Turning the sound off and playing a game in complete silence is an option, but not a good one. Luckily Frontier Days comes packed with a fabulous set of songs. The background music accompanies the pioneer game extremely well, the tunes played on guitar, mandolin, and fiddle is something we would listen too even if we didn’t play the game. Once you hear the jingles play, you will be set into the right mode for a bit of pioneering.

Final Thoughts

We have spent well above 15 hours in Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers and it has truly caught us by surprise. Even after so many hours in what is considered a small game priced at only $9.99 – we feel there is just so much left we want to do. The game has a good amount of depth, providing dozens of hours of fun. The games story mode is challenging and will defiantly occupy for a long time. And we throughly enjoyed the sandbox mode, this is where the game really shines. Playing without a set goal, made the game feel a lot more relaxing and slow paced, similar to an Animal Crossing game that you can pick up whenever you have a few minutes to check-in on your villagers, add a few buildings, do some exploring and maybe beautify your town just a little more. The game is currently priced at only $9.99 in the Nintendo eShop, at this price tag we would recommend to add the town simulation to your Nintendo Switch games library, it is by far one of the strongest 3rd party games currently available for the Nintendo Switch.

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You can buy Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers on the Nintendo eShop for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo 3DS.

Big thanks to ARC SYSTEM WORKS for providing the review copy of Frontier Days: Founding Pioneers.