Frostpunk 2 PC Review
Summary: Frostpunk 2 follows the first game in setting the player up to make difficult decisions to keep their city going. An interesting city builder/grand strategy game that constantly engages.
4.5
Chilling!
The original Frostpunk was a game that I enjoyed immensely. It was the perfect combination of strategy and resource management, combined with being almost unreasonably challenging at points.
Its sequel, the unimaginatively titled Frostpunk 2 continues where the city builder left off in this respect—seeking to deliver an experience that’s as brutal as it is engrossing.
For those unfamiliar with the Frostpunk franchise, the basic premise is simple. A city building and management sim, where the world has all but died. The landscape has been overcome by a vicious tundra, a frozen wasteland devoid of almost all resources and life itself. As the leader of your settlement, you’re in charge of everything from ensuring that everyone has appropriate housing, food, materials to build with, and most importantly of all, heat. Citizens that have frozen to death, tend not to be good workers.
Resources are thin on the ground and almost all are finite. It’s very possible to run out of the things that you need to survive if you’re not careful and doom your city to inevitable death.
The scope of Frostpunk 2 feels like it’s shifted slightly since the original game. This time around, it feels like there’s been a shift from a small city builder to more of a city builder with a grand strategy spin on it. Everything feels expanded and pushed up to the next level in terms of scale.
Your city is represented beautifully, sitting on a hex grid (though this isn’t immediately obvious unless a visual representation is toggled on,) a central core that radiates heat surrounded by a multitude of different sectors and districts that each fulfill a different purpose. A mixture of dark, industrial sectors, with bright areas intermittently poking through to light them up. All set against the background of the blinding white snow. It’s a striking image for sure.
Ground that is available to be built on is initially quite scarce. Teams can be sent out to break the ice and free up land to be built on or have resources extracted. Expansion can be rapid, but doing so puts your city at risk. Everything requires resources, used at a near-constant rate, so pushing out into the wilderness can put a strain on what you have and very quickly set the game into a death spiral if not handled carefully.
As in the first game, Frostpunk 2 sets the player up to make difficult decisions. Several factions live within your city, each with its ideals and agendas, and keeping the populace happy is another one of the game’s many balancing acts. There’s a multitude of ways that it can be done. Enacting laws (that need to be voted through), and researching various technologies that fall in line with their particular brand of philosophy will go a long way to keeping each of them happy. Along with this, there are macro decisions that need to be made regularly. These too can eventually affect policy and it’s often a tightrope of weighing up what might be best for the city as a whole, versus a particular group of individuals.
It’s these tough calls that help to keep the game interesting. Early on I had the opportunity to massively increase output in my coal mines by enabling child labour in them. I was struggling to keep my heat up through a particularly nasty cold spell at the time, so there were obvious advantages to doing it. One faction rightly raised concerns that this wasn’t a good idea and that it would probably be better to find another way of raising coal reserves. However, another faction was thoroughly behind the idea though, reasoning that a bit of short-term pain would benefit the colony as a whole.
The difficulty arose when because this pro-child labour group had been my number one supporter when enacting laws lately, and turning on them now could make things trickier down the line when trying to pass a vote.
Visually Frostpunk 2 doesn’t look all that much better than the original. Don’t take that as a mark against it though. The first game looked good and still does. There’s been a fairly hefty upgrade in terms of texture and material work, there’s a lot more granular detail on buildings now, though you still have to zoom in a reasonable amount to see it.
This upgrade in fidelity comes with an upgrade in system requirements. It runs quite well and comes with a full suite of upscaling and frame generation options courtesy of DLSS and FSR3, but it does hit the CPU quite hard compared to the original. If only I could channel the heat being dumped by my PC into my city while playing it.
Final Thoughts?
The challenge of the original is largely still there, though it didn’t feel as punishing this time around. I remember my early attempts at the first game all stalling and getting everyone killed relatively early on, and while I came close a few times, most people lived in the sequel. There is a range of customisable options to cater the difficulty to different players’ abilities, so veterans can crank it up for a truly brutal experience.
Frostpunk 2 is a fantastic sequel to the original game. The shift to a wider focus rather than staying at the macro level might not be to everyone’s tastes, but I rather enjoyed the push to bigger and more expansive lands.
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