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Few games have made me feel as stressed as Frostpunk 2. The city is a churning beast, spewing steam and filth, chewing through coal, people, and hope. It demands and demands. So many hungry citizens and petulant factions to juggle. Disastrous cold spells devour your stockpiles and your hard-earned, meticulous efforts. Riots, crime, and rising tensions. Crisis upon crisis, stacking like the rampant squalor and acrid fumes that weave their way through the city’s districts. It plays like an ever-morphing puzzle that yanks you back to what feels like square one whenever you creep close to cracking it. It’s almost too much. After 30 hours with Frostpunk 2, I’m not sure it’s all that fun, but I’m still hooked.
Let’s set the scene. You play as the steward guiding a group of survivors as they try to establish a sustainable society in a brutal ice age fraught with dangers, not just from the cold but from the ambitions, needs, and darker leanings of human beings. The focal point is the generator, a hulking industrial colossus churning through fuel to distribute heat and keep everyone alive. You’ll need to gather resources, enact laws, settle feuds between opposing factions, produce food and goods, and explore the Frostland. The premise doesn’t veer far from the original Frostpunk and improved graphical fidelity, a soaring score, and sleek cinematics make the dive into this frosty world more compelling, gritty, and immersive.
A lot has changed, namely the decision to veer away from the building-by-building placement around the heat-producing generator to a district and tile system. You have Extraction Districts to mine coal and forests. Then there are Food, Housing, Logistics, and Industrial Districts all serving a distinct purpose. The need to build in proximity to the generator is gone. Placement is far more forgiving. Each district occupies a cluster of tiles and as long as you are producing enough heat to sustain them they can be placed miles from the generator. It dulls the need to think strategically about building placement, but, the trade-off is that Frostpunk 2 loses some of the granular city planning of the original, the simple joy of laying down individual homes or a research centre in the right place. There was a palpable enjoyment in finding the perfect layout for efficient heat distribution and resource production and transport, which is more or less gone in Frostpunk 2. It’s worse for it.
Captured by VideoGamer
Captured by VideoGamer
Captured by VideoGamer
Captured by VideoGamer
Instead, that granularity has shifted to what’s best described as damage-limitation management. Your city is made up of factions and communities, each one with a different vision for the future. The machinists favour efficient but polluting industrial and technological solutions. The Foragers favour adaptation and are weary of using machines. And so on. There’s no way to please everyone and your standing with each of them affects the overall trust that your citizens have in you. Siding with one when picking a technology or voting in a new law in the Council Hall invariably angers another. They bicker and scrap, like squabs in an icy nest.
You can negotiate and hope to steer the vote. Promise to construct a certain building and the faction will fall into line, but that’s another problem to deal with later down the line. In theory, it should add another dimension to keeping the city ticking over, but often feels like a grinding chore that never quite evens out. It’s all trade-offs for trade-offs, an endless, spiraling chute of promises and concessions. And, oh do the factions clamour and demand constantly, distracting you from the very tricky task of keeping everyone alive. I understand the desire to up the sense of realism and mimic the woes and concerns you’d expect were this to transpire in real life, but something has been lost in the process.
There’s never quite enough resources to go around either, especially when the cold really hits, so it’s about making sacrifices in the right place. A colony can ferry oil to your city, but the workers there will live a foul life, likely dying. You can unlock a tech to boost your coal output, but be prepared to see the sickness rate soar sky high as pollution wafts above your housing districts. A building should solve your production issues but you don’t have the workers. So off you go to build more housing to attract more people. But those workers need more heat and food. That means more production districts, which in turn require more workers and so on. It’s problem upon problem, a bit like plugging a leak only for five more to pop up. Nothing comes easy. Again, it’s a lot.
Few games have made me feel as stressed as Frostpunk 2.
It’s an excess that bleeds into other parts of Frostpunk 2 as well. Frostpunk was challenging but always fair, while the sequel is downright vicious whether it’s the scarce resources, the compounding consequences of a small mistake early in a playthrough, or the way you never quite get a sense of being on top of everything. Things snowball much faster. Everything is against you, wanting more and more, never relenting. It’s exhausting. Failure as a feature. It’s clearly by design, but in doing so it has shed some of what made the original one of the best city builders out there. Rather than a tough city builder, Frostpunk 2 feels like a crisis management sim.
But for all that, Frostpunk 2 is a gorgeously designed and atmospheric game. You can almost sense the cold on your fingertips as you click the mouse. The screen ices over and cracks as massive ice storms swoop in and engulf your city. There’s a real sense of urgency and fragility to the whole experience. A freefall into absolute chaos is always just around the corner and that tension is very real when playing. When the dominoes do start to tumble, Frostpunk 2 invokes a sense of helplessness few other games do – city builders or otherwise.
And, when you do finally crack the puzzle for a few brief moments, when everything runs just about smoothly, when no one is barking for anything, when you can finally take a breath, it isn’t so much a meaty pay off as just pure relief. It’s over, finally. Not for long, though.
Review on PC. Code provided by the publisher.
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