Frostpunk 2 improves upon nearly every aspect of the original and completely surpasses our expectations.
The RTS genre has had its ups and downs throughout the last few years. With a failed renaissance, many RTS fans have been left without a home to really enjoy themselves in. Luckily, an old friend makes their triumphant return from the frozen wastes. Complete with all the morally dubious policies you could ask for, Frostpunk is back with a brand-new title with a different scale and scope.
The first Frostpunk was a beloved game; be it for the story or the frustratingly hard gameplay, it had found a chilly place in the hearts of many. You were quite possibly the last real city on earth if you could call it that. Leading a handful of survivors, you fought tooth and nail each day to ensure your citizens had enough to go about with. And as of August 2024, the light of New London is burning bright, and child labor laws be damned.
Frostpunk 2 is an innovative, challenging, and visually stunning experience that offers many of the comforts and best things that made the original so great while introducing tons of new ideas and concepts. This doesn’t mean that the two games are similar. Except for the grim world, Frostpunk 2 feels like a completely different game in all possible good ways.
Much of micro-management is now gone. You focus on the overall governance of the city, and your survival isn’t a question; it is a hopeful guarantee. How you achieve it really matters. Your fight is now both inward and outward, and all the while, you lead multiple cities to a hopeful, albeit grim, future.
In many ways, it is a new world. You get to see more and connect more, even on a larger scale. The developers at 11 Bit Studios really outdid themselves. The game dives into elements of strategy and 4X, reminiscent of HUMANKIND or the new Memoriapolis. Even the returning mechanics and repeating systems have turns and twists about them, giving a completely fresh, albeit a bit colder, experience.
The story mode is really where you start. It introduces you to all Frostpunk 2’s mechanics and leads you through well-crafted scenarios. You get a new adventure and learn the nooks and crannies of the game. The campaign’s story is much less fleshed out, almost an afterthought, which was a bit of a disappointment, seeing as how a large part of the connection within the first game was its story and narrative.
That said, you still feel equally connected to the world through all the other things the game adds. The Utopia builder is more of a free mode, as hinted in the name. You pick an area, play around with a few parameters, and set forth to build up and expand your city, starting from scratch.
Once you begin, whether it be the narrative-driven story mode or the Utopia Builder mode, you start off with an already built city, not much unlike the one you ended up within the first Frostpunk. It’s definitely more advanced, and the city is way larger already. You immediately see the first set of differences; Frostpunk 2 is now built around tiles.
You use your workers to slowly break through these massive ice sheets using the aptly named ‘Frostbreakers’ and place different district zones in different tiles. This lets you expand your city in a more organic fashion, with less inherent micro-management. You build around and along the geography, netting any benefits they might provide. Little things such as these go a long way in making the game more immersive.
Breaking the ice exposes resources, and the zoning system allows you to turn entire swathes of resources into a large network of districts. Resource collection isn’t that fine-tuned, so you do not have to worry about assigning workers and all that; instead, you can regulate the output of these districts.
You have to manage and utilize a myriad of resources, some of which are incredibly rare compared to the usual steam, coal, and oil that all culminate in the ever-elusive heat. Heat is your core resource, and in a game called Frostpunk 2, you’d imagine heat would be important. You also have your food, goods, and materials; no guesses as to what these do. You also have rarer resources, such as cores and prefabs, which you use to unlock certain buildings.
As you gather resources, eventually, you will start to have surpluses. These will be stored in your Stockpiles. Each resource has a certain amount of stockpile, and you can always get more by building stockpile hubs.
Your generator in Frostpunk 2, located in your central district, is the primary producer of heat. Here, you may look at the supply and demand of your heat or put your generator into overdrive, increasing its efficiency but causing wear, which eventually will cause it to malfunction and increase deaths.
Buildings have important functions and require space in districts, which is why it is necessary to expand districts periodically. The most important buildings are the research institute and the council hall.
Your districts will also have certain abilities that improve their function, usually at a drawback. They can be toggleable, have a one-time activation, or be set on a cooldown timer, and sometimes, they need a prerequisite building, event, or law.
Much of the infrastructure is built automatically as you plop down districts, giving you room to work on other things. These other things mostly deal with the different problems pertaining to your city. These are cold, squalor, crime, diseases, and hunger. You’ll come to hate these five things the most; your four horsemen turned five, so to say. Of course, you’ll hate your people even more, but that comes much, much later. The 5 problems are affected by the conditions in your city and, in turn, will affect your city in different ways.
Your city will start off with a few communities and factions, and these will increase in numbers and size as your city grows. This is the basis of a few of the mechanics, and the fractions essentially represent the many districts of your city. Over time, these fractions will either accept and respect you or come to despise you. You need to maintain the trust of these communities to stay in power. The communities essentially are the main factors in deciding the direction of your city. They affect the game’s tech tree and politics system.
Speaking of the tech tree, Frostpunk 2’s tech tree comes in the form of the idea tree; the idea tree unlocks various bonuses at the cost of the game’s currency. It might have immediate or stacking effects but also unlock buildings or upgrades. The idea tree is split into 6 categories; heating, resources, frostland, city, society and hubs.
Some of these are more important during the early game, while others remain a late-game focus. Each idea you can research has multiple diverging solutions offered by the communities inhabiting your city. You essentially pick a community to research the idea, and depending on the community, you get different results.
The second major community involvement is the Council. Here, you choose between a myriad of laws pertaining to a specific thing in your city. They are mainly split into four categories: survival, City, Society, and Rule. Some of these laws are immediately important and unlocked, such as the citizenship of outsiders, childhood education, and contagion prevention. Others remain locked as ‘undiscovered ideas’.
These laws need to be passed by the Council, which comprises the communities in your city. They vote on your laws, depending on whether they trust you or not and how they might inherently feel about the law. Most laws require a simple majority, while others need a two-thirds majority.
Finally, your communities, along with other factors, affect your zeitgeist. This effectively marks the spirit and flavor of your city and shapes your city towards certain beliefs. These are affected by and, in turn, can affect various thematic events throughout your game.
Eventually, you will unlock scouts, build a logistics district, and unlock another part of Frostpunk 2. With access to Frostland teams, essentially your scouts, you can zoom out and look at the greater map. You can see other territories and areas with varying threat levels and resources here.
You can launch expeditions that go out to these lands and explore these places. As you finish scouting areas, you’ll unlock the areas neighboring the one you just scouted. These areas might contain resources you need, and once you are done scouting, your teams could go out and harvest some of these resources. With time, you can establish new cities in these locations to properly harvest resources and expand.
Now, that’s quite a handful of mechanics that, at first, might seem incredibly daunting. Frostpunk 2 somehow [most likely due to the developers doing a good job] ties in all these mechanics into a neat little package that is somewhat easy to learn and adapt to. You are always guided, in one way or another, be it factions directly asking for something or a tooltip popping up, notifying you of something dire.
With the expanded scale of the game, micro-management has been reduced significantly. This doesn’t mean that you are left with little to do. In fact, in Frostpunk 2, you will often find yourself with your hands full as the communities and factions come to you with increasingly more demands and requests, and your people ask you to do things that you know won’t really benefit them.
You have to juggle between solving all the problems and keeping people happy. Of course, you can just choose to ignore them or say no. But all of that has consequences. Therein lies one of the beauties of Frostpunk 2, everything you do matters, not just in terms of a few numbers or a mood shift in the city.
There is always a reaction to everything you do; sometimes, they are imperceptible and sometimes incredibly direct. You cannot always run your city like a perfectly well-oiled machine. Mostly because, at times, you’ll struggle to find and extract oil.
The increased scale also has the disadvantage of making you feel disconnected from your city. This is a double-edged sword, of course. But, more often than not, you are still connected in many different ways. You will find yourself contemplating your decisions, weighing the actual benefits versus the political benefits. Sometimes, you will make decisions, horrible ones, for the ultimate greater good. Other times, you will make them to curry favor with a faction or community.
As you play Frostpunk 2, you will also discover different interactions and events, such as your people reacting to things or your communities making newer demands. Often, these will reveal more about the people and the communities.
You will struggle and fail often, be pressured to make incredibly hard choices and have your brain run on overdrive as external and internal threats desolate your cities. Each one can face differing problems at the same time.
That said, Frostpunk 2 doesn’t focus too much on the city-building part of your cities. As previously mentioned, much of the micro-management is hands-off, and this is, in a sense, somewhat of a step down from the previous game. For many, the intricacies and unforgiving nature of the game might also lead to a bad taste in the mouth.
All the struggles and failures sometimes make things frustrating, and at many points, it will seem like the game is out to get you. While this is likely meant to be a part of the experience, it sometimes comes off as too much.
This is exacerbated in the late game when you have multiple cities to manage and oversee. You will also sometimes suffer from the lack of clear instructions and information, which adds to the experience and somewhat takes away. Many of the effects of laws, ideas, and buildings are left vague. All in all, the new experience is not for everyone.
Frostpunk 2 achieves something incredibly technical with its seamless transition between the cities and between the larger map and the zoomed-in map. Your cities are also running in real-time, so you can just move in between them whenever and however you want.
This is really great, considering Frostpunk 2 is incredibly stunning. There is an exceptional amount of detail present within your city. While you might miss out on the micro-level of things, you certainly get to enjoy the macro of things. You get to see the zooming lights of moving vehicles when you put the game on a faster mode. The city still feels alive despite the lack of truly visible people.
Sometimes, this rings a little hollow. However, the scale limits much of the detail found in the first game. Since many of the mechanics are somewhat hands-off, Frostpunk 2 is less involved than the first one. This is also the case in the campaign, where the strong story of the first game is missed a lot. The campaign, while providing a compelling experience, loses some of its shine due to the lack of strong story elements. You don’t feel as close anymore.
Each frame is incredibly cinematic, with the UI being incredibly well-designed. It somehow adds to the feels of the game, all the while avoiding any clutter despite having to show a lot of information. God knows how the developers managed to cram so much into the UI while making it look sleek and light. There certainly is no spreadsheet simulator, and that much is for certain. With each of the different screens, you go off to, be it the council sessions or the idea tree, you are always visually entertained with cool-looking graphics and art.
The audio design is also amazing, and Frostpunk 2 is also great. The OST is just as good, if not better, than the first game. Immediately as you start the game, you get a cinematic theme with sinister undertones. The various tracks throughout Frostpunk 2 also add to things and create an incredible atmosphere, bringing otherworldly eeriness and hopelessness.
Most soundtracks start hopeful and descend into despair, much like your game. The tension also rises during whiteouts, and the music usually fits perfectly. Compared to the first game, the new soundtracks are incredibly dark and grand, befitting the theme of the new game.
The announcer, with his reverberating mic speaking of new laws, does so much to add to the atmosphere. It is a relatively small thing in the grand scheme of things, yet it does so much. It can honestly sum up the game itself—many little things that add up to a massive, fulfilling experience.
Frostpunk 2 is an incredible experience that does not miss a beat and drags you into the frozen wastes by your collars. It throws you into the chilly meat grinder and sets you about as you lead your cities to expansion.
Frostpunk 2 masterfully guides you through its beautifully crafted mechanics, nudging you in the desired direction. Eventually, it scales into a game of tough choices and a test of wills as you make hard decision after hard decision in an effort to save your city. For the many things the game takes away, it also adds newer things to supplement the experience.
Frostpunk 2 is the deserving successor to the original game that builds on pretty much everything and blows all expectations out of proportion. It is an immediate recommendation for city-builders, RTS, and 4X genre fans. And for fans of the original game, what are you waiting for? The frozen land awaits.
