Frostpunk 2 is a new city building survival game by 11 bit studios in which you have to build a city amidst a frozen landscape and survive.
Frostpunk 1 was a really fun game, but it never quite made it into my list of favourites. The premise of the original title was to build a small city building by building, whilst attempting to survive in the frost-bitten landscape you found yourself in. This meant being very careful with resources, having to prioritise certain things such as food or heat, and making difficult decisions which could lead to an unhappy populace but may be crucial to them surviving the next few days.
Building the city in the original felt intimate, and towards the end of a session you felt you knew your city and its populace inside out, which made surviving through the difficult times feel a lot more rewarding. Frostpunk 2 goes in a slightly different direction, with massive sprawling cities and large populations. It is perhaps an obvious choice to make, given it’s a sequel and they wanted to do something new, but it isn’t without it’s downsides.
So first things first, how does the game actually play. Much like in the original, you are in charge of a city attempting to survive the frozen world you find yourself in. This time, instead of building up a city building by building, you build large districts which hold many thousands of people and perform various functions automatically. These range from resource extraction districts, to housing districts, industrial districts, and more.
You can specialise these districts by erecting certain buildings within the district slots. These can be buildings which simply improve the efficiency of the task at hand, or specialise it in a certain why by adding research functionality or extra guard postings if you have a particularly unruly populace. The decision to move to a large district system makes sense as building cities on this scale individually would be a momentous task, but it does take away some of the intimacy you felt in the original. It’s a little more abstract, when you hear about several hundred people dying of frostbite, it doesn’t feel like it matters as much as in the original, you could really notice every person not turning up to work the next day.
With this larger scale though, opens up new opportunities in the gameplay. There’s a larger focus on governance this time around, with a council chamber system featuring several different factions which can change and merge over the course of a session. These factions all have their own interests and want you to govern in the way they expect, and managing the fine line between pleasing one faction and avoiding all out civil war makes for some interesting moments. The system works quite well and feels dynamic, giving the city a sense of being alive which helps counter the lower attachment you feel to its progression.
Adding to this, the game features a much large world to exist in. The original Frostpunk let you send out search parties to retrieve various things from the unknown frost, this exists in Frostpunk 2 as well, only you can now additionally set up other colonies. These colonies are usually specialised in a certain field, from harvesting food to resource extraction and manufacturing. It’s a good addition and it means you can balance things a little easier.
There does come a point though, much like in the original where there isn’t too much to do. This is a problem endemic to all survival games really, where if you manage to survive and persevere long enough, you’ll eventually either find yourself in a strong enough position that you can survive indefinitely with no real reason to make any hard decisions, or the resources will dry up and there isn’t much value carrying on playing. It’s not a fault of Frostpunk 2 per se, but if you’re looking for a city builder where you can play the same city for years, this won’t really work out for you.
Overall, I think Frostpunk 2 is a good game. The graphics and immersion are really great, and the game pulls you into it’s world effortlessly. I personally have a preference for more intimate city builders, however I know plenty of people out there will prefer games on a larger scale. Either way, it’s currently available on Game Pass for PC, so if you have that, I’d say give it a go and see what you think.
Frostpunk 2 is available on Steam here.
