Introduction

Steel Shadows is the second game in a series called Ancient Frontier, an independently developed Sci-Fi strategy game by Fair Weather Studios. The game focuses more on the pirate side of space exploration and leans heavily towards fleet management as opposed to the empire management you'd usually see in games like Endless Space. It sits somewhere between Endless Space and Starpoint Gemini in terms of gameplay content, but the actual battles and progression are most similar to Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus minus the dungeon crawling.



The result of the direction taken is one I found extremely mixed, and the more of the game I played, the more I noticed a distinct lack of attention to detail. The basis of the game seemed promising, and it indeed has all the stat numbers and functionality of an interesting strategy title, but the implementation of all these ideas, as well as the general battle gameplay, really falls short of anything I could consider vaguely entertaining in an exciting way. While every game like this is usually a highly advanced version of rock, paper, scissors, it did very little to pull me in throughout my playing experience.

I also made a video review, see below: