The first Frostpunk released way back in 2018, but made quite a big splash, bringing a lot of new ideas to the gaming industry. The game stood apart from the rest, both in its mechanics, and in its… jokes. If you know that the main ingredient of the soup is the sawdust, corpses can provide great nutrition for plants, children can work 24-hour shifts in the mines… then you have played the original Frostpunk.
However, the game’s community immediately split into camps. One side wanted to see a sequel that sticks to the winning formula without major changes to existing mechanics, only featuring enhanced graphics and a new story.
Unfortunately, in most cases the developers support such conservative players since it is an easier, cheaper, and safer method. But sometimes there are those who are against using the conveyor belt type of development, and Frostpunk 2 devs belong to these rare cases.
The second camp was ready for everything new and unusual. And it is the second camp that is very lucky, since they received an extremely unusual, unfamiliar and at first even incomprehensible game: Frostpunk 2. It is worth noting that the sequel carries over very little from its critically-acclaimed predecessor: the setting, idea of the survival in a freezing world, a couple of smaller mechanics, and that’s about it.
This is our Frostpunk 2 review.
Let us begin! What is Frostpunk 2? The game is a continuation of that one strategy where you manage a small settlement, trying to give people hope and help them survive in a rapidly freezing world. New London, Teslagrad, and other familiar names have migrated to the sequel as well.
The sequel is bigger, more complex, more exciting, and has given extra depth to the mechanics of the first game, reworking many of them at the very core level and introducing new elements. Do you remember the good old laws that helped you to patch up your settlement and keep it afloat a bit longer as you grapple for more time to survive this joyless world? Pubs and alcohol? Child labour? Porridge from sawdust? All of this made its way into Part 2, but more complicated and developed to a higher level.
The developers have improved the game, making it better in every single aspect, longer, and more complex as well. The scale has been raised in everything as well. If in the first game you had to manage a couple of thousand people in a settlement (with rare exceptions), the second game will see you take care of tens of thousands of workers with the same amount of ordinary people on top.
The events of the game take place 30 years after the construction of New London. The game starts with the Captain’s death. As the Captain’s successor, it is up to you to take the post. And the new post also means new problems.
The generator has no fuel, the city is short of houses, supplies are dwindling right before your very eyes, and frosty blizzards are approaching. The inhabitants are divided into several factions with different, sometimes even diametrically opposed views, and everyone looks at you with a certain amount of suspicion.
In this chaos, you need not only to save the settlement, but also get a vote of confidence in the council. As in the game’s predecessor, the plot serves to only outline the very general goal of your progress, and to an extent it is a deep tutorial on the features of the game. Throughout the prologue and five chapters, we will discover new features and mechanics, as well as face various problems of New London that must be overcome.
The theme that runs through the entire project is human nature and the sometimes blind conviction in our decisions. Players will constantly face difficult choices that may have a rational justification, but are questionable from a moral point of view. Should we kill perhaps the very last herd of seals for the sake of a quick replenishment of the dwindling food supplies? Should we send children into narrow passages of coal mines, since the main deposits are exhausted? Should we accept only healthy and young people into the city, thus separating and breaking apart families?
Each of these questions has a clear answer from a moral point of view, but will it be able to feed and warm up the settlement when the whole world is plunged into icy captivity? Frostpunk 2 retains the gloomy atmosphere of a snowy post-apocalypse, revealing human nature, which can take radical measures for the sake of survival.
The game has chapters – and all actions and decisions from chapters flow into the next. We have our City, which we develop through the chapters instead of starting anew with a different one.
The game immediately gives a sucker punch to the players who thought it would be just a continuation, following its predecessor down to the letter. New mechanics are used immediately in the tutorial, to prepare you for things to come. Fortunately, the game has a wonderful help feature that even has a search by words. What is especially surprising is that it works as it should. You can find help for any action, for any district or event. Everything in the game has undergone significant revision. Even time, which is now measured in weeks and months, and not hours. The city itself is now huge, and it is all thanks to you as you carve it out of ice.
And that is exactly the first thing you will have to do in any settlement. You can’t just go around building wherever and whenever you want. The territories are overgrown with ice, and underneath them are rare deposits of resources that your town desperately needs. Having cut out the ice, you can build districts consisting of several hexagons.
There are 5 districts in the game – Residential, Food, Mining, Industrial and Logistics. You can build a mining district over a resource deposit – and it will begin to flow from under the frozen lands to your warehouses. Food is also acquired similarly, your people live in separate residential districts and require goods, both essential and luxury. And now you can build production districts, deciding what will be produced, goods for people, or metal for the construction and maintenance of the city.
You will also have a General map (Frostlands), where (much like in FP1) you will conduct Scouting, extract resources, meet survivors and encounter other settlements. And face difficult moral dilemmas. Scouts can be acquired through a special district, open for construction in limited quantities.
The Frostlands are vast, split into their own regions, offering opportunities for exploration and dozens of events.
And there will be plenty of hard choices to make! Do you recapture a settlement by force or try to negotiate? Save the children, or use them as a workforce in the mines? Kill the possibly last herd of the seals to replenish your resources, or let them live?
Having made a difficult decision in the first few chapters, you can be sure that you will definitely face the consequences in the following chapters, and each time you will be able to trace it back to your own choice.
On this map, you will find not only events, but also outposts. They can contain various resources, the extraction of which will save you and yours way more than once through the course of the game. In FP2, you will have to build a transport route for each outpost and allocate labor in the form of Scout Squads.
Each outpost will require people and a road to the city you need. You also have to distribute where the resources go – to which of your settlements – wisely.
Cities will have their own resource management. Even just the construction itself is already a small challenge. After all, each district needs to be provided with heat, comforts, transport, etc.; industrial districts cause pollution and diseases, injuries and deaths. If you build a residential district nearby, it can collapse due to pollution, and will have to be repaired.
On the other hand, building far from each other is also not profitable, because each district needs to be provided with heating. One heater can heat up either 2-3 districts (but with lesser coverage for the additional ones), or a single district.
You will also have to grapple with limited construction space. It will not be possible to build everything, extraction is timely, but providing goods, money and materials is quite difficult. All resources need to be managed, distributed among settlements, produced and spent wisely.
The last resource is Time. To be honest, I seem to never have enough of it and am always late with something. Either there is not enough oil to keep the generator running constantly, and the supply from the dreadnought will arrive only in a week, or you need a little more money than you have, or there are no modules to expand the district.
Each district can be expanded by adding hexes to it, as well as adding a slot for a special building. In the largest district, you can build 2 special buildings. Each building gives its own bonuses, Residential Block – more space for residents, Clinic – helps treat patients, Institute – speeds up research, Ventilation Tower – reduces pollution, Automatic Thermal Control – gives heat, but increases pollution, Watchtower reduces crime, and more.
You will have to juggle with parameters of every district, helping yourself with the construction of these special buildings. There are also centers to keep an eye on, they will help provide your city with more space for storing resources.
However, there is one special resource that will really grind your gears. Faction relations.
Frostpunk 2 did away with Hope and Discontent for the entire settlement. Now there is city discontent, and various groups to keep in mind, including 12 factions and 8 communities.
Politics play an important role in leading your city. In the first game, you could pass a law with a simple snap of your fingers (as long as the necessary research was completed), but now everything became way more complicated.
The city has a council, the organization of which resembles a classic parliament. Each faction in the city has a certain number of seats in it, depending on its numbers among the population.
The groups treat you differently – from reverence to deep hostility and radicalization. Any law you may want to pass will require at least 51 votes out of a possible hundred. And don’t expect everyone to support your decision! Sometimes delegates themselves put issues on the agenda, bypassing you.
However, you can always try to negotiate with the faction representatives before the vote, promising them something in return – the construction of a certain building, the study of a specific technology, or the adoption of a law that interests them.
Of course, you can break your promise, but this will inevitably worsen the relationship. It will not be possible to get a perfect reputation with everyone: what pleases some will certainly cause discontent among others. But it is still possible to maneuver between the interests of various groups with a certain finesse. You can appease factions by funding their projects, praise them in public, or make small promises that will not harm your relationships with others.
The easiest way to handle the political sphere is to choose one side and simply drive the dissatisfied out of the city. Depending on your decisions, some groups may become radicalized, and the overall tension in the city will increase, which will lead to pogroms or even uprisings. Whether you will be a skilled politician, maneuvering between the interests of factions, maintaining a delicate balance, or will you suppress all the dissatisfaction with brute force, like a dictator – it depends only on you.
The most important resource in Frostpunk 2 is people and their relationships: both with each other and with you.
The game will constantly force you to monitor all available (and unavailable) resources, if just one is missing, it will start an entire chain of problems, and you will have to send resources from the central metropolis to the supply colonies.
Regulation of existing districts will also take up a lot of time and attention, sending workers to the necessary projects, research, and politics are even more important still. After all, you do not want rebellions in the city. Regulating the capacity of districts to reduce resource consumption will be a frequent action at first. Fortunately, the game will show you each resource in a beautiful design.
The visual and audio components of the game are a topic of their own. The game has simply divine visuals. Yes, now you will NOT be able to see people on the streets of New London, but you will see their life and their work reflected in your city. You can see the heating through the pipeline, and the work of people through the smoke released from the pipes.
The shimmering snowy landscapes are mesmerizing, and the buildings impress with their steampunk architecture. For a project focused on building a settlement, the level of detail is really pleasing. You just have to zoom in on the camera, and you can examine in detail all the bizarre mechanisms that help people survive in this harsh freezing world.
Special buildings in the districts can be examined from a close distance, giving you a chance to see them in the process of work. You see how your city changes from all your decisions. Riot, and the district of the city will change slightly, a lot of discontent and crime – the Districts of the City will turn black, as will the sphere \ indicator signaling tension.
Similarly, you can turn to the map of the Frostlands to see how the construction of roads and paths is progressing, and how your decisions transform the map itself. Weather changes, storms and calm times, research windows, even windows telling small events, everything in the game is simply incredibly stylish.
And when you enter the Council, you can examine each faction follower, with a small footnote reflecting their views. The sound complements the visuals. Announcements from the loudspeaker, the sound of breaking ice, the sounds of working buildings and all other sounds in the game are made with high quality and skill.
Having become bigger and moved on to a larger scale, the game also lost some of the charm of its predecessor. Previously, the problems of your people felt incredibly personal: you would see how a family would lose a father or a child that had died working in the mines. Throughout the campaign, you’ve got to witness dozens of such little tragedies and joys.
In Frostpunk 2, the global problems of society came to the fore. The big moral choices in the game are weighty and the consequences are sometimes terrifying, but there is a degree of separation from witnessing something personal to ruthless calculus of survival.
There are dialogue boxes that fully outline the problems for you, but the personal approach is gone, and it is a bit sad. However, with the game reaching an unprecedented scale, it also gained something in the process too. Dialogue with factions brings large-scale problems, such as how to avoid destroying the city and pleasing everyone with whom you can negotiate; who to pay, and who would be better to destroy.
Before we took care of each of our little people in the settlement, now we decide incredibly important issues within the framework of the survival of the entire city. Should we let only healthy people into the city, or everyone, but with quarantine; should we let in hard-working people, or everyone, but with the cost of resources; should we give out essential goods for free – or let people solve these problems themselves – after all, the settlement needs money!
Frostpunk 2 showed a new side, with the game partially becoming a simulator of political struggle in a post-apocalyptic world. The protagonist of the first game is dead, and no one really believes in the new leader. They are in no hurry to give you power, and you still need to earn trust and respect.
As a result, everyone who was waiting for Frospunk 2, regardless of which group they belonged to, received a wonderful, deeply developed and superbly made game. Did it live up to expectations? It’s up to you to decide, but my 3 dozen hours in the game clearly show my attitude to it. The game surpassed the first part in all aspects.
