Developer: 11 bit studios
Publisher: 11 bit studios
Available on: PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (GOG, Steam)
Reviewed on: PC
At one of the last PAX South conventions in San Antonio, I brought my laptop like I always do, primarily to knock out email and get some work done, but also to toss a game on every now and again. I have memories of playing the original Frostpunk until deep into the night, knowing full well that I had a full day of convention ahead of me and needed my sleep, but, as Civilization and strategy builder game motto goes: “Just one more turn.”
I don’t remember details about the original Frostpunk, which I’m sure will impact my review a bit, but the warm feeling I got playing it (ironic about sending out a bunch of pilgrims to freeze to death on a regular basis) stayed with me all these years. I then went recently on to finally take on the brutally difficult “This War of Mine”, another 11 bit kick in the junk, and another game I’m finally glad I took off my to-do list and took the time to slog through the pain.
So when I found out there was a new Frostpunk sequel, I was excited. And fortunately, 11 bit studios didn’t let me down. Frostpunk 2 has that same feeling as when I played the much-praised remake of Capcom’s Resident Evil 2: in my brain, I KNOW the new game I’m playing couldn’t possibly be the same as the game that I played two decades ago, but it has the same feeling though. And that’s how I felt playing Frostpunk 2: that same warm glow of “Where did the last five hours go?” and “Just one more turn” came back and came back strong.
If you’ve never played the original “Frostpunk” or “This War of Mine” game (it has always been an odd name, but go with it), imagine playing a version of a Civilization-style game where you are regularly met with having to make decisions that will lead to large numbers of people to die. I remember in the original Frostpunk (and the tradition carries on to the sequel) one of the early decisions is whether or not you want to legalize child labor. Having a big labor force early is absolutely critical as every minute counts in the game, but there are the ethical and safety concerns of having a 10-year-old running around a coal mine, and of course, things go terribly wrong where you’re eventually forced to decide whether or not this is a good idea after all. Oh, and things get way, way worse. You are regularly forced to decide whether or not people will die for productivity and the survival of the population. Way down the road, there were two absolutely devilish decisions I was faced with that had me barking with laughter at the fact that they were even suggesting something so evil…but made so much sense.
So what’s different with the sequel? Where the original campaign took place around a generic generator with a rag-tag army of survivors struggling to survive, you start Frostpunk 2 with the bustling “city” of New London. While you’re not exactly thriving, the groundwork has already been laid and the citizens of New London are surviving. The original leader (you) from the first game…ahem…dies, and now you are brought on as The Steward, the man running the show for New London. But now, despite survival still being on everyone’s minds, this collection of humanity has broken down into diametrically opposed factions of how things should run. The two primary factions are the Stalwarts and the Pilgrims: the Stalwarts believe in New London and securing the area around New London and New London only, continuing to improve and grow the city. The Pilgrims are convinced that it is their job to spread the security of New London and search the frozen wastelands to build settlements to expand; to see what’s left of the rest of the world. How that affects you is that they are constantly squabbling with one another, and every decision you make usually delights one of the factions at the expense of the other.
With the factions, you now have the city hall, which is where the laws are passed. Where laws were a thing last time, now there’s a huge political back and forth with the different factions to get things passed. I played through focusing on the Stalwarts and their goal of growing New London, which pissed off the Pilgrims, which made getting any laws passed tricky. Regularly, you are forced to sit down with some of the opposing factions (there are more than two) to try and “politic” votes out of them for the thing you want. Generally, you’ll have to make election promises for future votes for things they want or fund projects that they want to have built (remember, usually pissing off the other factions), so you better REALLY want to get that law passed. And be advised, if you make promises and their faction votes on it, and the law still doesn’t get the number of votes to pass, you still have to give them what they want or their favor will continue to spin out of control on you.
If a faction gets too upset with you, they will start holding labor strikes and protests that absolutely wreck your business-as-usual production of services to keep everyone alive (how ironic), going even so far as to set up riots and call votes of non-confidence on your ability to run the town. All of that also is balanced by how well you’re running the town: if the heating oil, food, and supplies are running like water, the city is going to have a hard time getting behind having you deposed. But if things are going poorly and you’re doing a bad job of balancing the factions, they might just have enough votes to throw you out…and that’s game over.
On top of that, there’s an entire outside map now that you’re sending scouting elements known as the Frostlanders to poke around the outskirts of New London and look for resources, which turns into a game in and of itself. So not only are you balancing your main city of New London (go Stalwarts!), but you start building out resource colonies that you can move people and things to, but also become outposts that you need to keep one eye on as well. The external regional map becomes vitally important as the resources around New London as the days go on get more and more scarce, and you have to backfill to keep the flow of people into New London heated and fed.
Frostpunk 2 never let me get too comfortable. Every time I started to fill my reserves with precious oil, food, and supplies, more than I ever thought I could spend, the game would randomly throw a surprise into the mix to keep me on my toes. Very few points in the game did I ever feel comfortable throwing the game from “normal” speed into “very high” speed; most of the time I had my game on pause as I went from colony to colony, from building to building, and making sure everyone was happy, micromanaging the hell out of everything. It was always an organized chaos, such as a surprise influx of refugees finding their way to my front door to a surprise ruining of resources, things that weren’t completely a surprise given the state of the world. But I was constantly having to pause the game to think of how I was going to rectify the new situation. The hardcore mode of Frostpunk 2 has no pause button and doesn’t allow you to “save scum” (AKA save every time you want and then reload if something doesn’t go your way) which sounds like a nightmare. I played on normal difficulty and was constantly pausing it; I’m sure that now that I know all the systems, all the story surprises, and the inner game mechanics, I could up the difficulty a smidge, but towards the end of the game, I was regularly on the brink of disaster with everyone in the city hating me.
The story, ironically, goes a different direction from the first Frostpunk. The first Frostpunk was all about surviving brutal whiteouts and impossible drops in temperature at regular intervals. Frostpunk 2 has very specific chapter breaks with different campaign objectives. However, unlike a lot of Civilization-style games where you complete a one-off scenario and then start a fresh new one, when you finish a chapter, you keep using all the resources and buildings you’ve built up to that point. This does make me wonder if the game doesn’t eventually punish you for lollygagging around for too long, just gathering resources and getting “comfortable”. Every resource in the game has “permanent” nodes or two that you can gather indefinitely, but the other problem is every 100 weeks in-game or so, you get an influx of new births and refugees adding to your population, meaning you have to build more housing and secure more resources to keep everyone happy and healthy, and even as I’m typing this out, I can see the problems already.
While Frostpunk 2 had me smiling and cursing at my computer the whole time, it wasn’t without its bugs. One time, I set my scientists to extra work to try and haste through some necessary research, and for the rest of the game, I was penalized like I was working my scientists as though I had them in a forced labor camp. It was really borking with how my citizens felt about me, and I did get to one vote of non-confidence thanks to in part this bleeding effect misinformation of my torturing my scientists. Another glitch had me recovering resources from a place, the scouts got stuck, and then proceeded to remain stuck for the entire rest of the game, while the scouting alliance, the Frostlanders, were permanently pissed at my not bringing these scouts home (even though they were stuck in the environment). This was later in the game, but still, that and the scientists brought down my popular sentiment enough to really throw a wrench into things. Annoying, but I was able to counter it with enough backroom promises and throwing money at the situation to keep the angry factions from lynching me in the streets.
Also, another issue is Frostpunk 2 seems to happily let you miss events. The user interface has three major points you have to keep your eyes on: the city council voting button in the lower left, the research queue in the lower right, and the scouts status button. Each one ticks upwards to completion, but there are no “HEY, THIS THING IS DONE” announcements when your city is holding its next vote or when your scouts are finished scouting. The button flashes once, and that’s it. So more often than not, as you’re putting out one set of fires, you’ll completely miss the fact that you’ve gone 10 weeks without giving your scientists something to research. And it’s obviously done that way because the game is all about minor paper cuts like this. They could sound huge alarms and pop text up in the center of the screen every time one of these timers is done…but they clearly choose not to in order to have you feel the pain. Time is critical in Frostpunk 2, and every time you miss a timer like that, you’re wasting precious potential resources…much to the glee of the sadists over at 11 bit studios.
What a damn fantastic game. It took 25 hours to play through the campaign, and I’m wildly curious how fast I could build things out knowing everything I know now, but I also have about 19 other games in my backlog begging for my attention. Just know that if you enjoy that desperate decision-making process that both 11 bit studios games, Frostpunk and This War of Mine, put in front of you on a regular basis, then you’re going to love Frostpunk 2.
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