Standby for Titanfarm

Developer Frame Break Publisher Amplifier Game Invest Format PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series Origin Sweden Release Spring (Early Access)

Or Armored Corn, if you prefer. Farming with mechs is an instantly appealing pitch, even before you see what Swedish developer Frame Break has done with the idea: think of how many farming games have you painstakingly watering individual grid squares of crops, taking up a sizeable chunk of each working day, and then imagine hopping into the cockpit of a vehicle with a spray attachment that lets you hose the entire patch within seconds. “We call it a ‘farming power fantasy’,” CEO Joakim Hedström says. “Giving the player all these mighty abilities to work on a larger scale.”

From the very beginning , Hedström tells us, the studio knew it wanted to make a farming game: “We saw that there was potential to innovate in that genre.” Back then, three years ago, Frame Break was just a trio of graduates from Sweden’s University Of Skövde, working remotely for the best part of 18 months, “developing and pitching [the game] at the same time”. It took a while to settle on what kind of twist to add to the formula, he adds. “The genre was very much set in two different camps: you had the abstract top-down Stardew-likes, if you will, and then you had the very realistic 3D Farming Simulator type of game. The space in between was where we really wanted to see what could be done.”