As a seasoned city planner and survival enthusiast, I must say that Frostpunk 2 has left me both awestruck and exasperated. The game takes the gritty, steampunk aesthetic of its predecessor to new heights, making each district feel unique and alive with tiny touches like workers frolicking in the snow.
In the game Frostpunk 2, I found myself overseeing an expanding group of people struggling to survive in a world that had turned into ice. One faction within my city urged me, their leader, to repeal a law mandating rotational relationships for higher birth rates and instead enforce compulsory marriage. As someone who felt both laws were questionable, I was caught between the demands of my people, the bonds they’d created, and the radical groups emerging from extreme ideologies. Their desire was clear. However, my reservations outweighed their plea, leading me to refuse the request. This action sparked a protest that escalated into civil unrest, causing chaos, tension, and damaging the trust I had built with my people. Knowing full well this could happen, I accepted it as part of my role in preserving a fragile society, one that was mine to nurture or see crumble. After 30 hours in Frostpunk 2, each day became another challenge as a steward, trying to prevent the collapse of a civilization teetering on the edge.
In simpler terms, Frostpunk 2 is an engaging yet pessimistic game about survival, and it’s a unique strategy title within the city-building genre. Watching a city I had nurtured for nine in-game years crumble, despite having plenty of resources to sustain it for much longer, wasn’t enjoyable. However, Frostpunk 2 didn’t intend to make me feel good about this; instead, it taught me that the idea of uniting a society with a common vision of the future is often unattainable, no matter how well-prepared I am.
Similar to its predecessor, Frostpunk 2 is an engaging city-building game that requires you to manage resources effectively as you strive for survival in a world covered by ice and threatened by impending storms. The challenge doesn’t end with overcoming nature’s wrath; navigating the complex needs of the planet’s remaining inhabitants, each with their unique struggles, serves as the true test.
Experience has taught me that it’s often futile to expect unity within a society by envisioning a common future, regardless of how carefully I plan for it.
30 years following the initial game, Frostpunk 2 begins with the captain deceased and the city requiring expansion and continuation without his leadership. In this sequel, you assume the role of a steward rather than a leader as in the previous game. Unlike the captain, your responsibilities are more about facilitating the needs of the city and its inhabitants. Instead of enacting laws unilaterally to replace food with sawdust, for instance, as a steward, you must bring such proposals before a council composed of various city communities, where the implementation of such measures is decided by a vote.
As a gamer, diving into Frostpunk 2 feels like stepping into a fresh role compared to the original. Instead of being the ruler, I’m an agent mediating between different factions, which offers a unique twist that sets it apart. This change makes it a great starting point for newcomers, as while both games are about city-building and managing human nature through laws and societal views, Frostpunk 2 brings a lot of novelty to the table. The day-to-day gameplay is largely different from the first, with city-building, law making, and technological research feeling fresh and unique in this sequel.
In Frostpunk 2, instead of assuming a god-like role where players dictate and create, you take on the role of a mediator. This change in power dynamic is crucial as it forces you to choose sides or navigate the lesser of several evils to maintain a functioning society. The game doesn’t promise that everyone will be pleased, but rather emphasizes this reality. While this theme was present in the original Frostpunk, its exploration reaches new depths in Frostpunk 2, making it more about accepting that it’s impossible to please everyone entirely.
For seasoned Frostpunk players, navigating ethically questionable territories is a well-trodden path, whether it involves enforcing child labor or permitting public executions. However, Frostpunk 2 complicates these choices by presenting them in shades of gray rather than stark contrasts. This shift is achieved through intricate and multifaceted social structures that players must navigate.
In the sequel to Frostpunk, you monitor the well-being of your city through trust and tension instead of hope and discontent from the first game. Trust is represented by a bar at the bottom of the screen, while tension is symbolized by a Schlenk flask that simmers and erupts as societal discord increases. If you make too many unpopular decisions, your citizens’ trust will decrease, giving you a limited amount of time to regain it before being expelled. Similarly, if the tension escalates due to crime, squalor, illness, or hunger, you will be exiled. However, in Frostpunk 2, ensuring basic human needs like shelter, food, and warmth is only one aspect of the numerous factors that contribute to your success as a leader. This time around, you must also manage relationships within the various communities within your city.
Several communities can form in your city, each with their own set of morals, beliefs, and ideologies. While some communities will have overlapping values, each one still has a distinct view of what is best for the city. The Machinists beliefs, for example, are founded on technology being the path to a better future. The Lords, on the other hand, reject the advancement of technology and believe in upholding the traditions of life before the world fell to the ice age. The addition of communities paint a clear image of how this world has developed since the first, which gave weight to the world and its ongoing progression. If you build your city on the values of one community more than the other, then members of that community may split off to form a radicalized faction based on those beliefs, becoming an extremist borough all its own. The game features several communities, with each playthrough orienting around three at any given time. In addition, there are numerous factions that can form within each community, many of which I’m still discovering. All of them have their own influence on the choices you make to develop your city, so the level of complexity is high and the balance tricky to strike.
Shelter, food, or heat, are only a small facet of the myriad of other factors that determine your success as a steward in Frostpunk 2.
In contrast to many other games where you can triumph by aligning with a single faction, Frostpunk 2 presents a more nuanced experience. Managing factions’ needs and ideologies is like walking a tightrope to avoid causing unintended destruction, in this case, of your city rather than your house. If a faction’s views are consistently ignored, they may protest, increasing tension. Conversely, if they’re given too much preference, they can form an extremist cult-like following, hindering the progress of your city.
In this game, communities and factions serve as the foundation for its intricately connected mechanisms. Each choice you make, whether it’s constructing buildings, enacting laws, or exploring ideas, creates a network of outcomes and potential paths. Every decision triggers a chain reaction that leads to new laws, concepts, and opportunities, as well as conflicts. By backing an economy-focused, tradition-valuing community, fresh ideas to support these agendas arise. Yet, this also means foregoing the development of technology to withstand future severe weather events. Mastering how all these elements intertwine is a challenging learning process that unfolds over the game’s 15-hour narrative. However, once grasped, the game’s complex system of interconnected consequences becomes apparent, offering a wealth of experimentation opportunities that kept me engaged despite the game’s melancholic undertones about humanity.
In this game, small, impactful stories unfold as you manage your expanding metropolis, a feature that’s reminiscent of the original version. For instance, when a law was passed insisting mothers stay at home to raise their children, an upset husband asked me to either destroy his wife’s novel or let her keep it. Destroying it would boost relations with communities supporting the law, but allowing it increased trust among the populace. I chose the latter, and later discovered she finished the book and dedicated it to the steward. Such mini-stories offer a realistic touch, making you consider the consequences of your decisions, whether beneficial or detrimental. They also significantly influence the game’s events and cause-and-effect dynamics, which is evident in the city-building aspect as well.
Constructing a research center, vital for advancing your city’s concepts, involves a sequence of steps: initially breaking ground to establish a solid foundation, then creating a residential area, and subsequently expanding this zone to accommodate the construction of the research center itself. Each phase necessitates a workforce and resources to complete. For instance, building a hospital entails first investigating the concept, which can be undertaken by any given community (contributing to their beliefs), followed by an additional expansion of the residential area before actually erecting the hospital. This offers just a glimpse into the intricate web of interconnected challenges that demand careful management and strategic thinking. Although it may seem overwhelming, as I delved deeper into Frostpunk 2’s integrated systems, I found it equally exhilarating to explore the myriad possibilities and optimize my strategy. The complexity, despite being daunting at times, is what makes Frostpunk 2 an outstanding platform for strategic gameplay.
In much the same vein, the multitude of regulations to examine and the intricate steps involved in their implementation call for thoughtful deliberation. When you take a law to the council, you’ll find yourself maneuvering through every community and faction, a process that may differ depending on the circumstances of your gameplay. At one stage during my gameplay, passing a law necessitated negotiating with three communities and two factions simultaneously. The laws are numerous, spread across four main categories–survival, city, society, and rule–each further divided into several sub-categories and multiple proposals. It’s quite extensive. Despite investing numerous hours in the game, I haven’t even scratched the surface of them all yet. Each law carries its own consequence, such as mandating the sick to quarantine (which escalates demand for shelters) or making the sick wear a tag indicating they are “infectious” (which stirs up tension). Both laws embody different communities’ values, and implementing the one you believe is optimal requires convincing undecided parties.
Striking a deal inherently involves taking on responsibility, because it entails making commitments to those who are still uncertain. This could be through suggesting a law they desire, abolishing one they dislike, or potentially offering compensation.
There is a lot going on in Frostpunk 2, and it involves navigating a lot, and I mean a lot, of menus, as well as blocks of text to digest all of its rules and systems. It took me hours to confidently maneuver through the many menus within menus, which are a necessity to the game’s layered design. It’s hard to view it as a criticism, as I think its menu navigation is a best-case scenario, all things considered, but I can see it being a barrier of entry for some players, even returning ones.
Frostpunk 2 deserves praise for providing informative text boxes and tutorials for most major prompts and decisions, which significantly reduces the need to constantly switch between options. However, there are instances where the game fails to clarify that certain building abilities can only be activated after passing a specific law, without indicating its location among other laws or explaining its purpose. Including a direct link to the relevant law would have been a useful addition to streamline gameplay and minimize frustration. Despite this, I eventually managed to locate the required law, but it was too late as I had already invested resources into an alternative solution.
Managing a city and dealing with politics can quickly become an intricate web, but witnessing it evolve into a lively steampunk metropolis from above is truly gratifying. Despite the endless legislation and stressful choices, growing your city is a fulfilling accomplishment, enhanced by a visual banquet. Frostpunk 2 builds upon one of the original’s standout features: its grim and monochromatic atmosphere. However, Frostpunk 2 introduces vibrant hues to its structures, allowing each district to showcase its unique style, such as the housing district painted blue or the industrial food extraction areas green. This added color gives each area a distinct personality, which is particularly refreshing since you can zoom into a district and occasionally see your workers playfully making snow angels. Even minor details like this inject a touch of lightheartedness into a world that otherwise feels oppressively bleak.
Venturing into the icy wilderness past your city boundaries has seen some improvements since the initial venture. Now, you need to construct pathways linking this area back to your city to gather resources. This also offers chances to establish satellite colonies, which operate like smaller versions of your own city and serve as transport hubs for goods (managing a single city was already demanding enough!). The surroundings near your city, rich in resources such as coal, food, and materials, are only sufficient to get your city off the ground. To prosper and survive, it’s essential to delve into the icy expanse. However, expanding the game map can become frustrating due to a camera that doesn’t zoom out far enough, making it hard to fully grasp the lay of the land. Navigating the icy wilderness, keeping track of colonies, and strategizing for future expeditions can feel overwhelming thanks in part to the camera, adding to an already complex and convoluted gaming experience.
Once the end credits finished playing, I became aware that there were still aspects of the game that hadn’t fully sunk in due to its complex structure. The true essence of its replayability and experimentation is most evident in Utopia mode, the never-ending playstyle of the game. This is where you can test your skills at managing different city development projects across a range of sizes and resource availability, whether it’s exploring the frozen tundra or building a bustling metropolis. The game also offers impressive difficulty settings, enabling you to tweak the economic, weather, frostland, and societal conditions according to your preference, making each playthrough unique. Although I finished the main story in 15 hours, I’ve spent twice as long exploring Utopia mode, and have numerous experiments of varying difficulties running across multiple save files.
In contrast to being a replacement, Frostpunk 2 builds upon the core concepts of human nature introduced in the original game, taking them to impressive new heights. Rather than offering an identical experience, it presents a fresh, distinct challenge within its city-building mechanics. This arrangement allows both games to thrive independently within their respective niches of the genre, and it’s advantageous that they do so.
11 Bit Studios consistently carries a specific theme across their games, starting with the hit game This War of Mine. In Frostpunk 2, the studio has constructed its gameplay systems and mechanics to challenge you with extremely tough decisions, many of which result in the optimal outcome rather than the morally correct one. Frostpunk 2 represents a significant leap for the studio as well as the survival/city-building genre they significantly contributed to.
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2024-09-17 20:10