Alliance Tales: Battle For The Frontier Wants To Scratch Your VR X-Wing & Wing Commander Itch

This not-quite-a-sequel to last year’s Alliance Peacefighter requires and rewards patience.

Alliance Peacefighter, an X-Wing and Wing Commander inspired story-driven space sim, just arrived in mid 2025, so it was surprising to see another game in the universe pop up so soon. Developer Urban Logic Games clarified that Battle for the Frontier is more of a side story, a “standalone adventure” set in the same universe.

The Alliance universe games are hybrid titles, playable on flatscreen and in VR. I played this demo both ways and while the VR version requires a steeper learning curve, it is absolutely the more rewarding way to play. Battle for the Frontier supports full motion controls, so having spent hundreds of hours dogfighting in games like No Man’s Sky and the Warplanes series, I mostly felt right at home. Using the flight stick, throttle, and two sensors on the dash to adjust power between speed, shields, and weapons all felt very natural.

Battle for the Frontier’s controls are very sensitive out of the gate and the slightest twitch on your flight stick will send you spiraling. It took quite some time to fine tune the settings and train myself to make more subtle movements. This requires a lot of patience and trial and error. Thankfully, if killed in battle, the game has the option to respawn in the same place and continue the battle. There are also multiple difficulty settings, options to adjust how well your friendly AIs perform in combat, and even an invincible mode for anyone who wants to experience the story without dying at all.

Visually, this is not a feast for the eyes. It looks okay, but nothing mind-blowing. Up close, the ships (and nothing in the game, really) do not have a great amount of detail, but something has gone terribly wrong if you’re spending a great deal of time right up on a ship to begin with. There are no stop and stare in awe moments here, disappointing for a space sim, but everything looks clean in the headset with no notable performance issues to speak of.

Without spoiling the story, the demo is very straightforward. There’s the introductory conversation to explain the mission, then dogfight, conversation, repeat twice more, and done. It all ends on a cliffhanger that I think would have landed better had I played the original game, but the point of a good demo is to either garner a wishlist or an outright purchase. In that respect, mission accomplished. I wishlisted both Alliance games after finishing this demo. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to have earned that.

Alliance Battle for the Frontier can be wishlisted now on Steam and the demo is available for free. The original Alliance Peacefighter is out now on Steam for $23.99 and also has a free demo available.

Update 3/3/26: This article originally erroneously listed Star Wars Squadrons as being another game with VR motion controls and has been edited to fix that mistake.