Samar Studio just pushed The Front out of Early Access and into full 1.0 release today. For anyone who's been following the game since its October 2023 launch, this is the big one. For everyone else who's never heard of it, here's what you missed: a post-apocalyptic survival sandbox where you don't just find vehicles, you engineer them from scratch with real consequences for every design choice you make.
The Front puts you in 36 square kilometers of wasteland where you're supposedly a resistance fighter trying to stop a tyrannical empire. The story exists but that's not really the draw. What matters is the survival loop combined with a vehicle customization system that treats engineering as seriously as base building. You're gathering resources, crafting tech, building bases with automated defense systems, and designing custom war machines piece by piece using dozens of components.
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It's that vehicle focus that sets The Front apart. Lightweight frames move fast but crumble in combat. Heavy armor keeps you alive but crawls across terrain. Weapon mounting points are limited. Power consumption and weight capacity are real constraints. You're not picking a vehicle from a menu. You're sitting at an assembly platform making tradeoffs between speed, protection, and firepower based on what you're actually trying to accomplish.
What's New: Zombie Hordes And Weapon Upgrades
The 1.0 update centers on a new Zombie Horde Dungeon designed specifically to test your vehicle engineering skills through large-scale combat encounters. You're taking heavily armored vehicles into dense crowds of zombies where you can physically plow through enemies and demolish obstacles. It's not just mindless driving though. The new mutated AI can leap onto vehicles, which forces you to stay mobile and actually use your defensive systems instead of just tanking damage.
Two new endgame bosses live in these dungeons. Beat them and you get rare rewards and top-tier equipment. The whole system exists to answer one question: can your vehicle design handle sustained combat? Did you balance your build correctly or do you need to go back to the assembly platform and rethink your choices?
The Vehicle Assembly system got its biggest expansion with this release. Flamethrowers, toxin sprayers, and electric cannons give you new ways to control space with area effects and damage over time. But it goes beyond weapons. Sawblades, drills, and harvesters turn your vehicles into hybrid machines that can gather resources while devastating anything that gets close. You're building vehicles that serve multiple purposes now.
The platform also supports squad-based building, so teams can collaborate on vehicle designs together. Paint customization finally arrived too, letting you personalize your war machines with unique styles and colors. For players who've been building vehicles since Early Access, these additions open up significantly more strategic options. For new players jumping in at 1.0, you're getting the full feature set from day one.
The Core Survival Experience
The survival mechanics follow a familiar arc. You explore ruins, scavenge resources, craft tools, and build bases across the massive map. The progression runs from primitive equipment up through futuristic military tech as you unlock blueprints through a talent system. Higher tier gear requires Ether Shards earned from taking down NPCs and exploring dangerous zones.
You can also subdue the NPCs with jammers and turn them into followers who fight alongside you and work your crafting stations to speed up production. The follower system has its own talent trees for specialization, adding another layer of optimization if that's your thing.
Base building gets tactical with hundreds of modular structures you can place anywhere on the map. Pressure plates trigger automated turrets. Infrared sensors detect movement. You're designing defensive systems with overlapping fields of fire, choke points, and fallback positions. Advanced traps help repel the elite mutant enemies like bombers and assassins that show up in the 1.0 content. When someone raids your base on PVP servers, all that defensive planning either saves you or it doesn't.
Combat progression moves through melee weapons and basic firearms up to explosives, advanced weaponry, tanks, and helicopters once you've climbed the tech tree. Hazmat suits protect against environmental hazards. Night vision goggles let you operate at night. Over 20 base vehicle types exist beyond the custom builds you engineer yourself. The combat options expand significantly as you progress through the talent system and unlock higher-tier equipment.
Different Ways To Play
Adventure Mode offers an alternative if the full survival grind isn't your preference. Mission-based progression for up to six players with boss fights and objectives. No persistent world. You unlock tech by completing missions instead of farming resources for hours. It's built for people who want the combat and vehicle building without the survival game lifestyle or the risk of losing progress to offline raids. Both Standard Mode and Adventure Mode got content updates with the 1.0 release.
The game runs on Unreal Engine with DLSS and XeSS support for visual enhancement. Thirteen languages are fully supported including English, French, German, Russian, Japanese, both Chinese variants, Portuguese-Brazilian, Italian, Polish, Spanish-Latin American, Korean, and Thai. The community has also grown to nearly 70,000 followers across Discord, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube where Samar Studio maintains active communication.
What makes The Front worth attention is how committed it is to vehicle engineering as a core pillar instead of a side feature. The 1.0 update doubles down on that with special weapons and utility attachments that give vehicles real tactical depth. The Zombie Horde Dungeon provides endgame content that actually tests whether your engineering decisions were smart. Combined with the tactical base defense, the massive map, the follower system, and the faction warfare, it carves out specific territory in the crowded survival genre.
This is for players who want engineering and optimization mixed into their survival experience. People who get excited about designing vehicle loadouts and testing them in sustained combat. People who want their survival game to care about vehicle customization as much as base building.
The Front is available now on Steam with a 15% launch discount for two weeks. New players can jump into the full release with all features live. Returning players can dive into the Zombie Horde Dungeon and upgraded Vehicle Assembly system. Check it out at the Steam store page and join the community on Discord to share vehicle designs and coordinate horde runs.
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