Wild Frontera is a bit of a mess, and I expected this going into it. It's a western-styled twin-stick shooter bullet-hell. The main problemWild Frontera is a bit of a mess, and I expected this going into it. It's a western-styled twin-stick shooter bullet-hell. The main problem with this game is all the missed opportunities and absolutely dreadful design. The art itself is pretty decent, and personally I love this style of game: the mindless top-down shooters, where you basically just shoot everything in sight. But the design is terrible; the entire game is wave-based combat, so you walk into a room, a magical barrier pops up behind you so you can't turn around (keep in mind this room is usually very tiny, or sometimes even a narrow hallway), and enemies spawn in waves randomly all over the area, meaning some can spawn on top of you, it basically has no regard to where the player character is.
This along with other design choices such as unkillable objects that fire bullets periodically, throwing knives that can be shot out of the air but because of this travel at 1mph and block your bullets, some enemy's corpses staying on their feet (the buffalo) making them still look alive, or the fact that some mini-bosses are harder than final bosses, or that even after beating the final boss you still don't have enough money to buy the most powerful weapon, can make Wild Frontera a painful experience to play through.
I beat the game because I looked it up and saw it was only 2 hours long, so even though I wanted to quit (and almost did regardless) at the first "room" you're locked into to battle waves of enemies, I pushed forward and made it to the final boss, which I feel I should mention was much easier than many of the previous bosses. This first room you're locked into is good foreshadowing for the rest of the game: you basically walk into this tiny town area, it locks the path behind you forcing you to go forward, and spawns enemies in EVERY direction, each of them shooting at you, while some speedy animals run up to you and start attacking so you can't concentrate on bullet dodging. Needless to say, you will die immediately the first time you enter this room, and then when you respawn it will probably spawn enemies on top of you a few times in a row and instantly kill you again once or twice; just wait until you get lucky and find an opening; lives don't matter anyway.
I want to talk about that buffalo I mentioned earlier. This enemy is encountered in a buffalo field with a bunch of them around; they're basically the typical "charge" character, where they'll just look at you for a bit, let you shoot them to death, but if you miss multiple times, they'll charge at you. This is all fine, but I want to use these points as an example of the bad design in this game which can be seen throughout in other aspects: When the buffalo dies the corpse barely falls over, it'll be pushed back but then it looks like it's still basically standing there alive, bad conveyance. Also, the part that really gets me is I saw buffalo fighting alongside the enemy bandits! This is wrong: encountering buffalo in a field is fine, it makes sense, they're all together where they should be and attack you for trespassing, but then I ran into one inside the town, and then I saw one running around with a group of bandits, this just flat out makes no sense. But it was a small aspect of the game so it's not that big a deal, but this is a small example of all of the terrible design choices made in Wild Frontera.
The weapon system is annoying; I get that you want bullets to travel slowly so you can dodge them, but they're so big and wide and glowing like they're on fire that it's just weird and unnatural. The shooting feels terrible and that's what the entire game is based around; if shooting the guns doesn't feel good, then the game doesn't feel good; and like I said, it's pretty painful to play through because of small things like this. Buying new weapons is unrewarding since most of the guns are over-shadowed by bad enemy spawns; it just depends which style of crappy gun you want. I felt screwed over when I first upgraded from a revolver to a rifle, because the rifle was so slow (it has it's perks: bullet penetration, farther range, more damage, etc.), but then I bought a shotgun that had a spread as wide as the screen and this felt over-powered. The weapons are all over the place, and good luck trying to purchase the final revolver, because even after killing the FINAL BOSS I was still short a few hundred gold.
The worst part is the potential of the game, it could've been super fun and well-made: the art is there, the engine is more-or-less there, the idea is there, they seriously just needed a different designer. And I seriously have no room to complain about the enemy design, let's just say you don't know frustration until a man slowly and nonchalantly pushes a cart full of dynamite THROUGH you and glitches you inside of it until it blows up.
Not fun, painfully unbalanced and terribly designed: Avoid… Expand
