Use your mech for farming, not fighting, in the first gameplay trailer for Lightyear Frontier

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Farm on an alien planet, solo or with friends, and create an idyllic home away from home.

The fantasy of climbing into a big stompy mech and blasting the hell out of your enemies with missiles and lasers is strong, but there's something incredibly appealing behind the idea of using a powerful mech to do a spot of peaceful farming, too. It's not just me, right? Doesn't that sound kinda great?

It sure looks great in the first gameplay trailer for Lightyear Frontier, shown at the Future Games Show today, where you're making your home on a planet at the edge of the galaxy. Plant and grow alien crops from the seeds you find while exploring the peaceful planet, build yourself a cozy home away from home, and customize your farming mech with upgraded tools.

In the trailer you can see how your farming mech works, as it sucks up water from a gentle creek and then sprays it into a plot where alien plants are being grown. This is high-tech farming, with your mech's laser selecting multiple growing slots in the planter before firing seeds from a gun-like tool right into the soil. Cutting down trees and busting up mineral deposits looks like it's done with some sort of grappling-drill, and you can switch from first-person to third-person perspective, which allows you to more easily admire the beautiful planet while exploring.

And don't forget to take a break from space-farming to just enjoy the idyllic world you're living on. You'll be able to play alone or with up to three friends when Lightyear Frontier launches in spring of 2023.

Christopher Livingston
Christopher Livingston
Senior Editor

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.