Final Frontier

Year 1989, Mirrorsoft, and a game whose title promises a space epic. The reality is a bit different — Final Frontier won't blast you among the stars, but instead places you before the problem of a civilization's survival after it brought this exact hell upon itself.

The setting belongs to the post-apocalyptic strategy genre, which was fashionable by the late eighties — a world after catastrophe, resources running out, humanity balancing on the edge of extinction. The specific form of doom here is at least original: not a nuclear explosion, but a biological disaster that knocked out the lower rungs of the food chain. The result is the same as after an atomic bomb — just slower and much quieter.

It plays as a turn-based strategy with emphasis on resource management and the survival of population groups. You decide on food allocation, research priorities, and expansion — genre standards of the era, nothing surprising. The controls are typically DOS: menu after menu, clicking without a mouse or with one depending on configuration, and an interface that doesn't help the player absorb information quickly. Those who grew up with Lotus 1-2-3 will feel right at home. Everyone else takes a while to adjust.

What made Final Frontier interesting at the time of release was precisely that unusual way the world ends. Bigger studios bet on nuclear winter or fantasy apocalypse, but this Mirrorsoft title tried something scientifically bleaker. Whether it followed through in depth or just hinted at it and then offered a standard survival-loop game depends on how willing you are to read between the lines of the mechanics. The graphics are functional and nothing more — a 1989 interface with no ambitions.

Today Final Frontier will appeal mainly to collectors of the Mirrorsoft catalogue and people who want to experience era strategy games as they looked before Civilization and Master of Orion — meaning without the layers of polish we only got used to considering standard in the nineties. You can fire it up in the browser via DOSBox without any problems, and if you have the patience to chew through the modest interface, a game with an interesting idea awaits you. Whether it delivered on that idea, I won't tell you upfront — it's exactly the type of game where you need to make up your own mind.