Frostpunk 2 Review: A Dark Masterpiece in a Post-Apocalyptic World

Frostpunk 2 isn’t your typical city-builder sequel; instead of focusing solely on high scores or profit margins, it offers a rich narrative experience set in a world teetering on the edge of destruction. Six years after the original, 11 bit studios has returned with a remarkable follow-up.

Though I usually play various city-building games as they are released, most don’t leave a lasting impression. I’ve come to terms with my lack of skill in managing the financial aspects or demolishing outdated city structures. However, Frostpunk’s relentless demand for resources and its initiatives to rebuild resonate deeply. The stakes are higher here; if you hesitate, not only can your city go bankrupt, but countless lives will be lost. The fate of humanity hinges on bleak choices, and I find myself at the helm of this steampunk metropolis. It’s a perfect fit.

After nearly 20 hours exploring the icy realms of Frostpunk 2, I feel equipped to share my impressions of this game. It is visually stunning, boasting new and engaging mechanics built on the foundation of its predecessor’s innovative ideas, albeit occasionally marred by technical hiccups. I’ve kept any campaign spoilers to a minimum in this review.

Going Wide or Tall

In a world engulfed in snow and ice, only a small city persists, sustained by a colossal generator amidst a backdrop of desolation. Decades of survival have prepared the city of New London to expand, and you serve as the architect of this transformation. The setting draws you in right from the outset.

Frostpunk 2 blends elements of city-building, survival, and policy management. Your primary goal is ensuring the survival of humanity while navigating these complex layers.

While I’m unsure who appointed me as the leader of what remains of civilization, I embrace the challenge. Fortunately, 11 bit studios eases newcomers into the game’s mechanics, unveiling features gradually.

Initially, players must dig through hexagonal tiles of snow to create districts for housing, food production facilities, coal mining shafts, and manufacturing plants. Strategic placement of these establishments can yield advantages or disadvantages, affecting heating or workforce functionality based on their types. Residents generally detest living near polluting factories, while proximity to heat sources or food is always welcome.

Larger districts can accommodate specialized buildings, such as hospitals, watch towers for crime reduction, and integrated housing within factories.

Every decision brings both benefits and drawbacks, prompting regular reassessments of building layouts based on evolving needs.

As you tackle these challenges, early on you face a crucial choice: dive deeper to tap into buried resource reserves or expand outward by establishing major outposts to bolster supplies for New London. This decision also influences your choice of fuel for the insatiable generator. Multiple playthroughs are required to fully grasp the ramifications of each technological path. Regardless of the monumental task you choose, it is riddled with harsh lessons.

Campaign

Typically, city builders afford you ample time to strategize, plan for the future, assess buildings, and rectify ineffective structures—all likely done at maximum game speed.

However, in Frostpunk 2, you’ll find yourself repeatedly pausing the action with the spacebar as if it were your favorite key. It is essential that research teams, exploration units, snow-clearing crews, construction teams, and any other task force you can imagine remain perpetually active. You can accelerate time as weeks pass on the ever-present countdown at the top left of the UI, but doing so can quickly lead to a city’s demise or a leader’s downfall, especially at higher difficulty levels.

This city-builder demands careful decision-making, and opportunities for second chances are rare unless you’re fond of reloading saves from hours prior. While reckless choices, like forcing workers into overtime or dangerously straining the generator, can be made, it becomes a daunting struggle to recover from escalating crises. Yet, navigating through dire situations and clutching to survival moments carries its own adrenaline rush.

Scarcity defines this post-apocalyptic landscape—crops thrive for limited durations, mines eventually exhaust their resources, living spaces are cramped, and salvaged materials stem from the wreckage of the past. Everything possesses a finite lifespan, and when something loses its utility, it must be recycled, be it a structure or a citizen.

Additionally, the unrelenting cold and sudden catastrophic freezes referred to as “Whiteouts” halt all work and sever external connections until the deadly storms subdue. Preparation for these events is crucial. You might have your city poised precariously on the brink of stability, yet the mere announcement of an impending Whiteout sends anxiety coursing through you.

Each week, hundreds of citizens succumb to the cold, tensions escalate, factions threaten riots, and the generator faces crippling overutilization. All of this chaos often unfolds in mere minutes of a Whiteout, which seem to drag on interminably. Surviving one feels exhilarating, as if the universe unleashed every possible challenge against your leadership, and managing to persevere leaves you feeling accomplished.

Dispatching exploration teams to survey unknown territories beyond the city is a gamble that pays off. It’s thrilling to guide scouts as they carve paths through the frozen wasteland, uncovering hidden resources. They might discover supplies to sustain the city for a few more weeks, incredibly valuable Cores needed for powerful district upgrades, or individuals to either welcome into your city or turn away. In some scenarios, entire outposts can be established, allowing you to build camps in stunning, mountainous vistas.

While political maneuvering occurs solely within the main city, outposts must still be supplied and maintained to thrive and provide essential resources. The game facilitates seamless transitions between your main city and these outposts, enabling you to swiftly zoom out to navigate the wasteland and zoom into an outpost’s structures. This feature showcases exceptional game design.

Apart from the main campaign, Frostpunk 2 features the Utopia Manager, which includes new scenarios set across various landscapes featuring customizable factions and difficulties. Despite its name, if my experience is any indicator, the only utopia you’ll create will be a frozen one. The political battles and harsh conditions during these massive levels remain as brutal as ever, but scenarios (many of which can be played in endless mode) offer a treasure trove of content for players eager to continue their frozen city-building adventures.

Faction Politics and Decisions

A significant shift from the original is that you are no longer an autocratic leader making unilateral decisions. Enacting new laws now requires a majority vote from a council representing various political factions in your humble city.

You can no longer freely impose drastic measures, such as inserting chemicals into food supplies or utilizing child labor in mines, without encountering backlash. I was pleased to find that, much like real-life politics, you can sway opposing factions by promising increased funding or future favors to gain their support. Frostpunk 2 showcases a range of communities, starting with a few political groups like the tradition-bound Lords and the technology-skeptical Foragers.

As external pressures mount from both environmental challenges and your political maneuvers, rebellious factions can emerge, adopting even more radical ideologies. These new factions can lead to both exhilarating and agonizing gameplay in Frostpunk 2.

At times, I found myself navigating protests against my leadership while simultaneously receiving praise from other factions due to my technology-focused efforts to save the city. I even deployed my supporters to counter-protest the dissenting group, resulting in violence and subsequently gaining recruits from a more sympathetic, moderate community. If overall city stability plummets due to this chaos, it may mean game over. The available options for enforcing laws include several ‘authoritative measures’ for dealing with major dissenters, should you choose to take that path.

Most decisions—be they technological, political, or related to random events—have unforeseen consequences. These might manifest as popular events demanding you reconsider a harsh law, such as allowing parental visitation rights for children raised by the state, or pushback from factions advocating for the election of their more stringent policies.

It was refreshing to see that standing firm in your beliefs, despite opposition, remains a viable strategy. When challenges arise, it often becomes necessary to make your citizens push themselves to the limit. This can involve exceeding worker hours, enacting laws that harm health but enhance production, overcrowding housing, or over-revving the generator that sustains your populace. All of these choices have significant ramifications if maintained too long, yet the game constantly questions whether such sacrifices for the sake of survival are justified. There are no wrong choices—only decisions dictated by necessity.

While you must cater to the initial factions early in the game, as the city expands with incoming residents from the wastelands, your strategies must evolve, sometimes compelling you to abandon previous alliances. The choices you make extend beyond the realm of politics. When I needed to rapidly increase the workforce and production output, implementing the Mass-Produced Goods law seemed like a brilliant idea.

However, once conditions stabilized later on, transitioning to the Durable Goods law, which ensures products last longer, proved to be the smarter approach. Naturally, factions favoring the original idea labeled me a betrayer for this switch, forcing me to view the new generation I had previously disregarded in a new light.

Unlike games such as Cities: Skylines, which display generic notifications about street cleanliness or park shortages, Frostpunk 2 presents far grimmer messages, such as “300 workers lose limbs due to excessive overtime” or “12 children perish in a street confrontation.” Such morbid notifications add a darkly humorous twist to the experience of managing a city.

Visuals, Audio, and Performance

Frostpunk 2 is visually stunning. From the moment you launch the game, the frosty atmosphere is intricately woven into the graphics and overall UI. Snow-draped landscapes juxtapose with the mountain peaks, while the steampunk aesthetic illuminates the narrow streets of New London. Each map your scouts explore serves as a visual delight.

The soundtrack offers an industrial, slow tempo that effectively conveys a cold, eerie vibe in which to build your cities and pass crucial laws. As temperature fluctuations occur, laws are enacted, or pressing matters arise, the sound effects morph into ominous groans and heavy thuds, mimicking the weight of your impending decisions.

Announcements broadcast from megaphones across the city following significant decisions made to navigate crises. But when Whiteouts strike, the soundscape becomes frantic—violins quicken as urgency permeates, reinforcing a sense of dread as the city goes into lockdown, sounds muffled, with only emergency lights flickering amidst the blizzard. This game triumphs in the realms of sound and visual design within the city-building genre.

Performance can become problematic over time. Playing on a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro with an RTX 3060 GPU, featuring 6GB of VRAM, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, and 16GB of RAM, I managed around 40 FPS at 1440p and mixed graphics settings upon launch. However, as hours passed, the frame rate dropped into the 20s, necessitating a restart for smoother gameplay. Even fresh cities exhibited a rapid drop in FPS from 70 to the 30s within a short span. I hope future patches can address these issues.

I had a love/hate relationship with the UI. On the plus side, the black and white color scheme is visually clear, with virtually every option featuring tooltips and helpful explanations. While district management can occasionally feel cumbersome, the color-coded areas remain easy to navigate.

One of 11 bit studios’ most impressive design choices is the contextual shortcut that provides instant access to an in-game encyclopedia by hovering over any menu item, resource, or district and pressing ‘T.’ This feature is brilliant, and I’d love to see it adopted by more strategy and city-building games.

However, the UI also presents challenges. Some elements can extend off the screen when opened, necessitating camera adjustments to view relevant information. Additionally, clicking on build menu options occasionally reroutes you to the research tab due to overlapping buttons.

Building upgrades require a separate menu rather than being selectable from the visible district, and the game often describes changes in vague terms, like “marginally” or “significantly,” without providing specific numbers or sliders for clarity on how actions affect outcomes. These small yet frustrating design oversights were disappointing in an otherwise compelling city-builder.

Conclusion

The quest for warmth, stability, space, and hope drives your civilization, with you, the Steward, guiding their fate. Aligning with the factions that vie for power adds a riveting layer to what elevated the original Frostpunk, emphasizing how turmoil within a council can collapse a city even faster than external calamity.

From the innovative district-building mechanics to the management of multiple outposts and the dynamic council voting system, Frostpunk 2 offers rich innovation that teeters on the brink of overwhelming yet remains endlessly engaging. I’ve grappled with countless difficult decisions concerning children, laborers, and technologies during my gameplay, but witnessing my city evolve into a sustainable haven has been immensely gratifying.

The game isn’t without its drawbacks, as discussed; UI glitches can lead to frustrating interactions, camera limitations can obscure essential information, and performance dips over time were vexing, especially in a city-builder requiring meticulous planning. Yet, the engaging gameplay and story made it easy to overlook these shortcomings.

I wholeheartedly recommend Frostpunk 2. It presents an unparalleled blend of unique gameplay and storytelling elements rarely seen in the city-building genre. The studio has beautifully expanded on the qualities that made the original game a classic without losing the emotional depth.

Frostpunk 2 launches on September 20 on PC through Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store, and Microsoft Store, priced at $44.99. It will also be available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass on day one. Players who pre-order the Deluxe Editions can dive in three days early, starting September 17.

This review of Frostpunk 2 on PC was conducted using a pre-release copy of the Steam version provided by 11 bit studios.

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