Frostpunk 2 review – A city builder that isn’t afraid to make you suffer

Frostpunk 2 is cold and dark. And I don’t mean cold and dark like your refrigerator when the door is closed. I’m not talking about the black soot and white ice of the 1800s ice age either. What I’m saying is that Frostpunk 2 is emotional cold and dark.

During your tenure as “Steward” of a small group of survivors struggling to survive the mother of all cold spells, you will routinely make decisions that, no matter what you choose, will result in the suffering, misery, and death of thousands of people. And it’s all just part of the job.

To give you just one example of many, at some point you’re going to have to establish a citywide policy regarding funerals. If you grant every stiff the dignity of a ceremonial send-off, your population will be happier in the short term. But if you decree that everyone should be thrown into the generator furnace as soon as they’ve popped their clogs, fewer of your people will freeze to death in the long term. One thing’s for sure: everyone happy and alive is never, ever an option in Frostpunk 2.

Our own worst enemy

I’ve played a lot of strategy/management games in my life, so I can say with some certainty that there has never been one with such a strong sense of atmosphere, tone and story as Frostpunk 2 (except maybe the original Frostpunkof course). And that’s no coincidence. Developer 11 bit studios has repeatedly said that in Frostpunk 2“The greatest threat is no longer nature itself, but human nature,” and the game absolutely delivers on this promise.

While the original game had you playing as a sort of autonomous dictator struggling with his conscience (which was traumatic enough), this time around you’ll be dealing with a variety of ideologically opposed communities. The way each of them prioritizes its own tribalistic ideology over rationality, fairness, and the long-term survival of the entire population is a thought-provoking and depressingly relatable reflection of how people behave in the real world. And you, dear player, are caught in the middle of it.

This means that in Frostpunk 2Not only are you juggling the use of a very limited amount of resources; you also have to balance the values ​​and priorities of your city’s population. If your decisions go against the wishes of a community too often, that group (even if it represents a small minority of the total population) can end up causing a lot of problems for everyone. On the other hand, if you manage to make a community particularly happy, they will hold meetings in your favor, resulting in various benefits such as a boost to cash flow or staffing. But good luck keeping them happy for long.

Almost every decision you make affects your approval ratings among these communities, but there is also a major new gameplay feature that explicitly relates to the political layer of the game, namely the Council Chamber. Every 10 weeks you can propose a new law. But in order for that law to pass, it must receive a majority vote among the 100 delegates representing the various communities in your city. Each new law has more advantages than disadvantages, but there are always Are disadvantages, and true to human nature, delegates always focus disproportionately on the disadvantages – and have conflicting views about which disadvantages are the worst.

This means that sometimes you have to do a bit of negotiating to get a new law passed, and that involves making a promise to a wavering faction in exchange for their support. That promise might be to build a certain building, research a certain technology, or propose some other law that the community chooses for itself. In this way, the politics of Frostpunk 2 is as deeply woven into the gameplay mechanics as it is into the narrative themes. It gives the game a new layer of depth and complexity—and a new way to give you, the player, a headache. And in Frostpunk 2In a strange way, headaches are part of it.

Harsh and also unfair

Frostpunk 2‘s belief in the value of tough decisions extends not only to how it plays, but also to how it’s designed. By that I mean that the game can be as hard on you as you sometimes have to be on the people of your city. There are a couple of text pop-ups at the start of the game, one warning you that the game is challenging and that you’ll just have to accept that, and another advising you to play the story before trying the new Utopia Builder mode, since the story mode teaches you how to play the game.

But the Story mode is pretty quick to take the training wheels off, meaning it doesn’t get bogged down in hours of tutorials, but also means that by the time you reach the second half, you and your town will likely be woefully unprepared for the incredibly steep climb in difficulty that’s about to come. At this point, I felt like I had no idea what was happening or why, and the game suddenly became extremely frustrating and stressful. The story mode is one long scenario, so all the time and resources you wasted early on (when everything was relatively easy) just makes it even harder as the difficulty goes up.

But when I gave up and decided to start a new city in the Utopia Builder mode, which is great and adds a lot of value to the package, I found that I had actually learned a lot of lessons that I could apply to the early stages of the game. And at that point I started having a lot more fun.

So while I would say there are definitely flaws in the onboarding, pacing, and balance of the story mode, Frostpunk 2 still offers an engaging and rewarding package for city-building fans willing to accept harsh punishment, give up, and start over.

8

Frostpunk 2

Frostpunk 2 offers an engaging and rewarding package for city-building fans willing to accept harsh punishment, but also to give up and start over.

Advantages

• Great atmosphere and tone
• Tightly designed mechanics
• Really food for thought

Disadvantages

• Difficult learning curve
• Can be stressful and depressing

A copy of this game was provided for review by 11 Bit Studios. Reviewed on PC.