Frostpunk 2 asks a simple question: what do you do when you’ve survived the apocalypse? Set 30 years after the events of the first game the world is still entombed in thick layers of ice and snow, but now it’s no longer enough to just survive – the people wish to live and thrive. The Captain is dead, long live the Steward. No pressure. You’ll probably be tossed out of office for letting the kids run feral anyway.
The answer to the question is a new form of society needs to be built, one for a world where freezing conditions remain a problem but aren’t the only focus. Throughout the 5-8 hour campaign, it becomes obvious that Frostpunk 2 is a far bigger game in scope. No longer are you placing single buildings, now you’re erecting entire districts with a few clicks. You aren’t dealing with hundreds of people huddled around a generator, you’re dealing with thousands upon thousands working and living in a vast city. No longer are you building in a small circle around the life-giving warmth of a mechanical beast, you’re sprawling out across the landscape like a spider-web. And no longer are you the sole judge of what is right and wrong, as various factions cast their votes on laws and have their own views on what must be done.
Platforms: PC (Xbox and PlayStation coming)
Reviewed On: PC
Developed By: 11Bit Studios
Published By: 11Bit Studios
Review code provided by the publisher
Frostpunk 2 does often lose that sense of intimacy that the original had, and with it the streamlined yet incredibly satisfying gameplay. Frostpunk 2 is bigger, grander and far more complex, but not always better. It’s already proving itself to be hugely divisive among fans, and I have to say, I think I’m one of the people who doesn’t like it. Which isn’t to say it’s a bad game – it’s actually pretty amazing. But it isn’t what I was looking for in a Frostpunk sequel. At least, not right now. I have a feeling I’ll go back to Frostpunk 2 sometime in the future when my brain isn’t already working at 100mph, trying its hardest to make me hate myself. Right now, the bickering factions, the constant teetering on the brink of failure and overwhelming amount of things going on in Frostpunk 2 are not what my mind needs. And that’s on me. I’m going to try not to cloud this review too much with my own bullshit.
My excuses as to why I became a rampaging tyrant intent on bundling up a chunk of my population into prisons and exiling the rest are less compelling, though. To be blunt, everyone kept bickering and kept getting in the way. One day you’re signing a law that says mothers are exempt from work so they can raise their children (it never said anything about mothers being questioned if they were spotted in public without their kids until I heard just that happening over a loudspeaker) and the next you’re forcibly squashing protests and furiously running a smear campaign against the Pilgrims because they keep shutting down the food industry with their bullshit. I’m just saying, it’s a slippery slope, okay?
It’s also a very different game from its predecessor. If you come into Frostpunk 2 expecting it to be a regular type of sequel that builds on what came before while adding some new things, there’s a reasonable chance that you’re going to wind up hating it. This sequel tosses out a lot of the gameplay elements, resulting in less of a survival city-builder and more political management game with survival elements. You’re dealing with the macro now, baby, not the micro. Side note: that last sentence is not a chat-up line, no matter how much you want it to be – trust me.
One thing that hasn’t changed though, is the constant sense that you’re about five seconds away at all times from the city imploding. There’s never enough resources to go around, never enough housing for the growing population, never enough fuel to survive a whiteout, never enough trust in your leadership. It’s the kind of constant stress that you’ll either thrive on or crumble under, because like Frostpunk 1, Frostpunk 2 is not a fun game in the traditional sense. Having said that, there are a few sprinkles of dark humour that can pop up from time to time and elicit a genuine laugh.
Let’s start with the basics of building your frozen utopia. Immediately the prologue introduces the concept of Frostbreaking, meaning you have to spend some workforce and Heatstamps, which act as a new form of currency, to deploy massive machines which carve through the snow and ice so that you can build. Once done, you’re free to begin erecting districts by clicking on a few hexagons until enough ground has been selected. Housing, extraction, industrial and food are all handled this way, and they various bonuses and debuffs when placed beside each other. Special hub buildings can be plopped on individual hexagons and apply massive buffs to districts, so planning how to maximise their placement is critical.
There’s an interesting mechanic at play where building a district over multiple resource nodes doesn’t increase how many resources you get – it just means you’ll have a bigger pool of resources to draw from. If you want to grab the resources quicker you’ll need to divide nodes among multiple districts, but each district you build ramps up the workforce cost, the heat needed, the materials and so on.
There’s also the idea that growth requires growth to sustain itself. Take the production of goods for example – these luxury items help stem unrest and increase how many Heatstamps you get from the population. To make more, you need industrial districts which turn extracted materials into goods. To get more materials you need to extract them which means more heat is needed and more workforce, which means more housing which means even more heat and materials and food and goods are needed to keep the people happy, and that means getting more fuel which in turns means another extraction district which needs more heat and materials. It never ends, and no matter what I did it felt like I was endlessly falling forwards into a stumbling run, only just keeping ahead of the giant boulder rolling after me. And while all of this is happening, there’s the ever-present threat of another drop in temperature or a full-blown whiteout that’ll wreck your shit if you don’t have enough resources stockpiled.
It’s exhausting. Frostpunk 2 is the kind of game where you can feel tired after playing it because it’s so mentally taxing, especially if you ramp up the difficulty or just make a few bad choices. The problem is, much like the first game, you won’t know you’ve made bad choices sometimes until the resulting snowball of destruction fucks everything up in spectacular fashion. It can be frustrating to realise that what lead to an impossible scenario occurred an hour or two ago with no real way of you ever knowing that was the case, and now it’s too late to fix. Some people will love this and happily fire up an earlier save or restart the chapter. Others will curse the developers. And then begrudgingly fire up an earlier save or restart the chapter, because gamers are often nothing if not gluttons for punishment.
Squalor and disease also have to be factored in because throwing down districts, expanding them, adding optional buildings to them and a host of other things can and will raise the squalor and disease, both of which hurt your community. These can be countered by researching and erecting upgrades in districts, but guess what? Yup, that means more resources.
I quickly realised that my starting city just can’t support all these people. That’s where exploring the Frostlands comes into play. By sending out scouts you can visit dozens of other locations that might offer solutions to your issues, whether it’s groups or people looking for a home or a handy group of seals that could be farmed for food. But now there’s also the possibility of discovering and settling new colonies, adding to your never-ending stress by giving you something else to worry about. Well, almost – these secondary places seem to run on slightly different rules. Early in the story mode, for example, you stumble across an abandoned Dreadnought and can send colonists to begin utilising its resources, and I discovered that it seems to operate on more generous rules as I was able to leave it cold, without food and starved of everything else without many issues. Most problems that popped up in secondary colonies, at least for me, were story-related events. That said, you do still need to keep an eye on them and transfer some resources around via pathways built in the Frostlands.
Just like Frostpunk one of the biggest priorities is constantly feeding the massive generator at the centre of your city so that it will supply the heat needed to survive. Unlike Frostpunk though, you don’t need to stare at a heatmap as the game handles that automatically – all you have now is a bar indicating whether you’re meeting the heating demand or not. That same demand and supply concept is applied to every resource in the game, and I admit to finding it a tad nebulous. In Frostpunk it always seemed like I could see exactly how everything was affecting everything else, whereas here it’s more vague.
Heating my city, however, is where I became aware of a fairly large bug that was working in the background. Basically, the game’s heating calculations are off, at least for me and some others on Steam, and the result was a city needing far more heat than it actually needed. It’s not the only bug or thing that caused problems either. The biggest issue though, is how much of a performance hog Frostpunk 2 can be. It can tax your hardware and run the CPU hot, so be careful. Luckily, it’s not the kind of game that benefits from a high framerate, so I was happy enough to cap it low. Still, some optimisation work is sorely needed.
Politics had a place in the original Frostpunk but this time, there’s a much heavier emphasis on managing multiple factions, all with their own vision of the future, ideologies and morality. The Stalwarts, for example, believe technology is the key to defeating the frost, pushing laws and ideals that will bolster the workforce through mechanical aid, to create a bigger and better city. The Pilgrims are the opposite, believing that we must adapt to the frost and focus on expanding into frozen wastelands, setting up small colonies so that no single event can wipe out humanity. The game’s main story campaign heavily revolves around the Stalwarts and the Pilgrims, as shown by a very early choice you make about whether to change the generator to run purely on oil, or to go down the Pilgrim’s route and allow multiple fuel sources.
Other factions spring up too, and hold their own unique views which contradict the others. And as you play, splinter groups can form based on the decisions you make, become radicalized and create chaos. Entire districts can be shut down because of mass protests, and if the tensions grows too great because of unrest, cold and missing resources then civil war can erupt.
In Frostpunk you were able to write laws into existence on a whim, deciding whether to send the children to the mines or toss sawdust in the soup. Frostpunk 2 changes that by introducing the council where the city’s various factions will vote on whether to pass a proposed law or not. To ensure your plans come together you can negotiate with factions, promising them things like completing specific research in the vast tech tree, passing a law they favour or changing something in the city. Sometimes this works out perfectly because you might promise them something you were already planning on doing, but more often than not it’ll be something you don’t really want to do. And just like every other decision you make, the other factions probably won’t be happy with your promises, either.
And I do mean every decision. Every technology you research, every district you construct, every law passed and every event that demands you make a choice influences how the factions view you. You can, if you want, focus on one particular faction, perhaps the one you most morally align with and aim toward growing it while pushing out the others. But the foundations for a good relationship are often the tombstones for another. As you support one faction the others will grow restless and cause problems, driving down trust and potentially getting you exiled.
Opt for certain paths, laws and technology and you could even reclaim the powers of the Captain and begin slowly driving out a faction, arresting its members and imposing marshal law. It’s a tempting option given how fucking irritating the factions can actually be with their often nonsensical demands and complete ignorance of what’s actually happening.
That’s a difficult path to tread though, and it feels more like the game wants you to perform a tricky moral juggling act between all the factions. After all, ignoring a good chunk of your population probably isn’t the smartest thing to do. It’s this juggling act that killed my enjoyment of the game, simply because it felt like I was pinball aimlessly bouncing around and reacting to the whims of a bunch of idiots who would blankly ignore reality to chase their ideals.
Maybe that’s the idea, though. Frostpunk 2 makes it pretty clear that you can’t keep everyone happy, that you can’t save everyone because it just isn’t possible. Try to please every faction all the time and you’ll wind up struggling to unlock the best technology or being unable to enact laws that are needed for survival. Attempt to make one faction dominant, and you risk alienating everyone else, and it can even lead to that faction becoming idolised, which brings its own problems as it become too powerful. Maybe the real point is that humans aren’t great en masse, because not all cultures can co-exist when their core values are so radically different to each other.
It’s philosophical musings like this that make Frostpunk 2 feel a little closer to the first game, itself an experience that made me contemplate morality a lot while I was busy ordering sawdust to be put into the soup. Mind you, in Frostpunk 2 the kinds of decisions that would make me pause for thought in the first game barely even register anymore – human experimentation? Sure, why not? I’ve already introduced a bunch of laws I didn’t want anyway to satisfy a huge portion of the population, so why not one more?
Outside of the main story mode, there’s a series of scenarios to be played through that dump you onto a map with an objective and just let you get on with it. In some ways I enjoyed this more than the somewhat lackluster story (which wraps up in an unsatisfying flurry) because I didn’t have to worry about events popping up and could enjoy the various systems and how they interact with each other more. There’s plenty of factions that can pop up, and it’s interesting to see how they play off of each other.
In Conclusion…
Frostpunk 2 is a confusing game. I didn’t like it very much, but I can’t deny that it is a good game, filled with intriguing design decisions. It’s overwhelming at times, packed with a lot of things to track and keep a wary eye on. It’s a less intimate game in many regards, echoing the famous quote from Joseph Stalin: “A Single Death Is a Tragedy; A Million Deaths Is a Statistic.” As the size of my city grows past 50,000 people, I realise he’s right. A dozen people dying in Frostpunk because of my actions felt gruelling. Here, it’s another pop-up amongst many, and the city will have grown by a few hundred by tomorrow anyway.
So, should you play Frostpunk 2? It’s difficult to say, because it depends on whether you can accept how radically different it feels to play. Nobody can deny the balls on 11Bit, though – this is a sequel that isn’t afraid of change, taking everything that made the first game special and growing it, sometimes to the point of being unrecognisable. There’s a lot going on in Frostpunk 2, and those systems can create magic. But they can also lead to frustration, or feeling disconnected from the city and its people.