The originalFrostpunkwas notorious for being extraordinarily grim, stressful, and full of difficult, depressing choices. The survival strategy game put you in the shoes of a small civilisation’s Captain, and made you build a small city around a generator.
In the desolate frozen tundra that is the Frostlands, you had to keep your people healthy, fed, and warm, or at least, as healthy, fed, and warm as is possible in an apocalypse. Resources are scarce – it’s easy to fail and be exiled by your people into the cold to die. Being a tyrannical despot makes things easier, but it also feels really bad.
Frostpunk 2is like its predecessor, but on a much larger scale. I don’t mean that the game is longer – I finished my first playthrough in about eight hours, which is actually less than theHowLongToBeat estimateof the first game – but it zooms out and forces you to manage things on a more macro level. It also adds a whole new democracy mechanic which means extra layers of difficulty, but we’ll get to that in a bit.
It’s also a very pretty game.
Taking place thirty years after the events of the apocalypse, the authoritarian Captain has died, and you have to lead your city into the future. Frostpunk 2 moves into a post-apocalyptic space where we’re less interested in survival and more in society-building. In practice, this means we’re no longer dealing with buildings and people at the individual level. The sequel, appropriately, no longer focuses on fiddling with the layout of New London on a building by building basis – instead, you will be expanding the city, laying down entire Districts on hexes with the click of a button.
There isn’t as much of a focus on Heat, or rather, not the same focus. Instead of micromanaging Generator levels, there is a supply and demand economy in New London. You have to build Districts of different types to ensure there’s enough Heat, Materials, Food, and the like to sustain your city and keep everybody in it from getting mad at you. You’ll be managing the economies of different resources on a higher level instead of constantly mucking around with the generator.
Of course, you’ll still be able to turn Districts on or off to manage Heat consumption and workforce availability.
Other aspects of the first game have been tweaked and widened in the sequel. The Frostlands, which you could scout and explore in the first game, are still there, and exploration remains a core mechanic for survival. You’ll have to send teams out into the wilderness to reveal markers on the map, and each district may have resources to scavenge or people you can choose to take in. In Frostpunk 2, you will also come across multiple potential settlements that you can establish, and these will provide steady influxes of resources to sustain you.
I particularly liked that you had to manually create a network of trails linking all your settlements to New London.
The Technology Tree from the first game has also been expanded into an Idea Tree, which ties in nicely with the new Factions system. Early in the game, you’ll have to establish a Council Hall, which basically functions as a Parliament. New London has multiple different Factions with diverging interests, each of which has seats in the Council. You can no longer unilaterally pass laws – everything goes through the Council first, and by default, Factions will vote according to their own interests and beliefs.
You can attempt to control vote outcomes by negotiating with Factions. This entails promising them concessions, and not following through with these promises will worsen your relationships with them.
Outside of the Council Hall, Factions are still at the center of Frostpunk 2. Every action you take and decision you make will endear you to a Faction and place you in opposition to another. Researching ideas that are more community- and equality-oriented (woke Marxist ideology, if you will) will garner you the fervent support of Factions who agree with you. Eventually, as extremist Factions emerge in response to your policies (both for and against you), they’ll begin to rally for you, protest against you, and even clash against each other.
An interesting extra mechanic here is Fervour, which you’ll have to manage in extremist Factions. As Fervour rises, so does tension between the Factions.
The Idea Tree plays into this because different communities may put forward different solutions to the same problem. For example, one Faction might want to raise children communally, while another might want to stick more to tradition and have mothers raise their own children. Or one Faction might want you to create subsidised housing blocks that provide all residents basic necessities, and another might ask you to create denser housing blocks to shelter more people at a time. Getting a community to research their solution will improve your relationship with them, and shift the direction of your society.
This move towards political manouvering as a crucial aspect of survival may not be to everyone’s taste, but I felt that it added enough meaningful complexity to justify its existence. After all, Frostpunk already had political undertones, allowing you to be a benevolent ruler or a ruthless dictator – the sequel just ups the ante.
As in the first game, events will pop up in reaction to your action or inaction. Combining dangerous mining practices with the use of child labour may mean you have to choose between letting kids die or losing access to coal deposits. In turn, policies that work in synergy with each other may increase the productivity of Food Districts without any extra work on your part.
As someone who wanted very badly to create a socialist utopia, there’s a lot of replay value to be found in replaying the Story Mode over and over again, tweaking your strategy and policy choices until you’ve gotten the best, most peaceful outcome. The game also leans heavily into the unforeseen consequences of actions you think might be in the best interests of the city, and it’s fascinating to see how doing things in different orders or pushing your society in different directions can play out over multiple playthroughs.
I failed to stick to my values and ended up having to rely on Propaganda to reduce tensions – as in the first game, being a dictator makes the game easier, but it doesn’t feel great.
The game concretises these different directions in the Zeitgeist panel, where you can see three different sets of principles in opposition to each other. There’s Progress versus Adaptation, Equality versus Merit, and Reason versus Tradition. You can see how your society measures up to each value, and how it’s impacting the Factions in your city.
I won’t spoilwhy, but I’m fairly sure it’s impossible to play both sides without blowing up tensions to an astronomical level.
There really isn’t all that much to say in the way of things Ididn’tlike. The game did crash a lot on my PC, though mine is a little older and I managed to fix the majority of these issues by dropping all the graphical settings as low as possible, after which it still looked pretty good. The game’s main storyline doesn’t change that much based on your choices, but there are still plenty of unforeseen consequences to throw you for a loop within that linear story. The default difficulty is pretty easy, but then it is theeasiest, makes it welcoming for newcomers, and there’s plenty of flexibility in customising the difficulty of a given playthrough.
Frostpunk 2 has shaped up to be a hefty sequel that built intelligently on the bones of its already excellent predecessor, capturing all the most compelling parts of the first game while exploring human nature and morality with deftness. I’ve already played it multiple times, but I expect I’ll be playing it many more in the months to come.
Reviewed on PC.
WHERE TO PLAY
11 bit studios' Frostpunk 2 blends city-building, survival, and strategy mechanics as it challenges players to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth with power-hungry humans.
