What kind of game would you get if you took the PVP and building elements of Rust, The Survival, and undead/mutant hoards from 7 Days to Die and threw in some time travel? You would get The Front.

The Front is an open-world survival crafting, PVP, and tower defense game with some time travel thrown in for good measure. It is truly a very ambitious project for a debut project for Singapore-based Samar Studios, but from what we have seen in their demos on Steam, the project is coming along very well and is slated for an early access launch on October 11th.

In an alternate reality, a tyrannical empire named the Imperium, has conquered the world, enslaved almost every citizen using monitoring devices, and has the ruthless will to kill any outlier and access to advanced technology to change mankind forever.

You are a member of a small sect of humanities, resistance movement, and hope that with a bit of stolen time travel technology, we might go back in time through various ages and correct the course of history. But in this war-torn land, you will go against imperial forces, exiles, thugs, and rebels that will determine the fate of humanity.

The first thing you notice when you jump into the game is that the game world is huge, with an open-world map of approximately 36km² in size, featuring distinct biomes such as forests, deserts, and frozen snowlands, each with its own resources and ecosystems, with realistic day and night cycles, 10 different variable weather effects such as blizzards, fog thunderstorms, and more to keep you on your toes, and even scenic vistas that you may want to stop for a minute and watch the sun rise or set.

As with any good survival game, you will start off with nothing and will have to find ways to fight off hunger, thirst, hypothermia, and even infections. At launch, you will only be able to play on public servers, so you will also have to decide whether to join with the other players or fight against them.

While you learn how to survive, you will gain levels and experience that you will need to use your experience to work your way through the tech tree of over 400+ technology formulas to learn, which will allow you to learn over 30 different types of basic building modules to build up a formidable base and fill it with over 100 different functional components, including crafting systems, irrigation systems, automated defenses, and even the ability to construct logical electrical systems to allow you to automate anything you can think of.

To defend yourself and your base, there is an arsenal of ancient and modern weapons for you to master, and you can even customize them with attachments such as tactical sites, grips, and tactical flashlights. But how do you defend your base from the hordes of mutants, zombies, and other players of ill repute? With defenses and traps, of course, with 20+ kinds of traps, weapons, and defenses such as crossbows, catapults, meat grinders, arrow walls, poison gas, electrical devices, and much, much more.

But you’re not going to have to walk everywhere you go; you are from the future, of course, so you will have access to build, ride, and fly in a wide variety of land, air, and sea vehicles that can even be augmented with additional weapons and armor to face the onslaught in style.

Though the future we came from is bleak, time is our oyster. To be manipulated and bent to our will, to ensure victory, for we are humanities’ last hope, and failure means extinction.

Are you going to play The Front on release? Let me know in the comments below.