Frontier Paladin

Frontier Paladin puts players in the boots of the first recruit of a shattered knightly order, descending into an underground ruin called the Crater to rebuild it from nothing. The campaign, now branded The Crater to distinguish it from a later-added mode, alternates between isometric exploration and combat and tactical tower-defense sequences where players fortify a position with traps and recruitable allies before holding a line against waves of enemies.

A weighty ARPG built around a tower-defense core

What reviewers single out most is the structural hybrid itself. Rather than treating tower defense as a side mode bolted onto an action RPG, Frontier Paladin builds entire story missions around set-piece defenses, asking players to scout a location, place traps, position allies, and then fight alongside them as waves close in. The melee combat underpinning both halves is described as weighty and stamina-driven, with two-handed weapons in particular — the war-hammer, halberd, and longbow — earning specific praise for feeling distinct from one another, especially after patches reworked their animations and resource costs. Boss fights are a consistent highlight, with multiple reviewers calling out named encounters like Ubir the Undead Warlord as standout moments.

A confirmed, fast-moving patch cadence tackling stuck geometry and stuttering

This review's research confirms Singular Scheme shipped its first patch within about 24 hours of launch, fixing a bug where players could spawn into a map in an unintended location and break their progress, along with a crash tied to tower-defense quests. A follow-up patch, "Update is live," significantly reduced stuttering and improved pathfinding for the game's navigational guide, while adding a quick manual unstick function for players caught in wall geometry — a direct response to a complaint raised in early negative reviews about dodge-rolling into walls and needing to reload a save to escape. A later "Ogre Sized Update" reported measurable, if modest, frame-rate gains of 7–10% in certain areas alongside further micro-stutter fixes, and revamped the tutorial and navigation compass to address players reporting confusion about where to go next.

A confirmed fix for the game's most common complaint: the map

Multiple negative reviews singled out the in-game map as unhelpful, with no way to zoom, pan, or distinguish icon types at a glance. The Cartography Update, shipped a few months after launch, directly addressed this by adding all three functions, alongside a broader pass on quest icon clarity. The same update rebalanced two-handed weapons further, added voice-acted lines to tower-defense sections, and adjusted equipment costs and drop timing that reviewers had flagged as inconsistent. It stands as one of the clearer examples in this review's research of a developer directly naming and fixing a specific, frequently repeated complaint rather than addressing it obliquely.

A confirmed rework of the game's six recruitable allies

A related complaint concerned the game's six recruitable companion characters, who reviewers described as useful early on but increasingly ineffective as the campaign progressed. The Allies Update confirms Singular Scheme identified the same issue internally, buffing companion health at mid and late levels, giving allies temporary immunity to hit reactions after players reported them being swarmed and rendered useless, and making a deliberate effort to differentiate each ally's role — ensuring, in the developer's own words, that a heavily armored Paladin ally no longer feels interchangeable with a cloth-wearing Priest ally. The same patch fixed a cluster of smaller companion-specific bugs, including broken interact prompts for two named NPCs and a quest that failed to direct players to the correct destination.

What the achievement data shows about how far players get

Global achievement percentages corroborate a steep early drop-off. The first story milestone sits at 66.1% of players, falling to 55.8% for reaching player level 1, and then dropping sharply to 21.7% for recruiting the game's first named ally and 11.6% for a specific boss kill. Every remaining achievement — additional ally recruitments, higher player levels, and further boss kills — sits at or below 3.4%, with several at effectively 0%. Read alongside reviews describing sparse zones and a slow midgame, this suggests a meaningful share of buyers experience only the opening hours before moving on, ahead of many of the fixes and additions detailed above.

Rough edges patches haven't fully resolved

Not every complaint has a confirmed fix in this review's research. Tower-defense traps — the barricade, fire pit, and caltrops specifically — are repeatedly described as low-impact and rarely worth building around compared to simply fighting waves directly, and no patch note in this review's research specifically addresses trap balance. Default controls remain a sticking point for players on keyboard and mouse, with a gamepad recommended by several reviewers despite ongoing gamepad-specific input issues also being reported and only partially resolved across multiple patches. One negative reviewer described the game as feeling unfinished, comparing it to an early access title in its current state; Steam's own storefront data shows Frontier Paladin has never carried an Early Access designation, so this reads as a subjective impression of its polish level rather than a description of its actual release status, and is reported here as such rather than as fact.

A roguelite mode, added months after launch

Roughly four months after release, Singular Scheme shipped The Celestial War, a free roguelite mode built on the same combat and tower-defense systems as the main campaign but restructured into a more combat-focused, replayable loop, alongside further balancing and bug fixes. The addition signals a developer still actively expanding the game well past its initial launch window rather than treating the original campaign as a finished, final product — though, per the achievement data above, it's worth noting this content arrives well after the point where many players appear to have already moved on.

Where it lands

Frontier Paladin earns its Mixed reception honestly: the tower-defense/ARPG hybrid at its core is genuinely distinctive and its best moments, particularly its boss fights, land well, but launch-era jank in controls, navigation, and trap balance left a real mark on how players received it. Singular Scheme's response has been unusually fast and specific, with confirmed fixes for the map and ally systems standing out as evidence of a team actually listening, but not every complaint has been resolved, and the achievement data suggests many buyers won't stick around long enough to see the improvements that have shipped since launch.