There's always something to do in Frostpunk 2, and you never have the resources you need to solve everyone's problems. While playing the main story I was kept busy by the constant fires I had to put out – not literally, actually… if everything was on fire, then that might solve some problems because at least my people would be warm.
Indeed, managing New London is no easy task, especially with fanatics and ideologues determined to get in the way of my pragmatic approach to survival. Frostpunk 2 is a rare gem among city builders as its gameplay fully embodies its themes and narrative. You're trying to cultivate civilization in a cold, hopeless hell, and it certainly feels that way.
Welcome to the Apocalypse
Frostpunk 2's systems work in conjunction with each other to make your life miserable. Fossil fuels are needed to power the generator and create heat, but a workforce is needed to extract the fuel, but the workforce requires housing and housing requires heat. It all requires balance, the perfect allocation of resources to keep everyone alive for another week.
At one point, I was running my own main city and two colonies. My oil colony had no means to feed itself, so I was constantly sending food from New London to support the workers there, and all was well until I ran out of food sources. I couldn't simply feed those in my oil colony because I needed the oil to keep the people in my main city warm, so I had to quickly expand my scouting operations to find new food sources outside the city. In Frostpunk 2 you are constantly updated, so pre-planning is vital to success.
I'll admit that I don't have extensive experience with city builders, but I feel like Frostpunk 2 will appeal to a gamer like me who values aesthetics and narrative over excessive systems more than other proponents of the genre, who favor more personality than type A. Frostpunk 2 certainly has robust systems, but the real draw is the stakes you're facing and the feeling of desperation that Frostpunk instills in its players.
Sure, Cities: Skylines might stir up illicit feelings of struggle and desperation if something goes completely wrong in your city, but the consequences just don't feel that personal. When my reckless sewage system caused the illness and death of thousands of people, it was a shame but also a kind of comedy. Your divine status in these games means you won't face any personal consequences. But if you let thousands of people die needlessly in Frostpunk 2, your days as a steward will be numbered and you will likely “lose” the game.
The world-building effort in Frostpunk 2 is the game's special sauce. There's a strange oil-sniffing cult to divine the future, radicals who shun technology and disapprove of any attempt to fight the apocalypse, and reactionary fascists who want to kill thieves with meat-vaporizing robots. I don't have much interest in city builders, but I was intrigued by Frostpunk 2 because I wanted to see how this world developed as I played.
A fair challenge of game development is putting all the pieces together to create a cohesive experience. Have you ever played a game where everything is fine on paper but you walk out and feel nothing? I think one of the main reasons for this is that it can be difficult to make everything cohesive with so many people working on different aspects of a game, and sometimes the finished product ends up feeling disparate. Frostpunk 2 is one of those games where everyone at 11-Bit Studios was operating under the same vision, to make the world bleak and the player hopeless, in an enticing way.
I have yet to properly explore Frostpunk 2's utopia-building mode, but I was honestly sad to see the story mode end so abruptly. 11-Bit has already announced three expansions, and I sincerely hope they are narrative scenarios in the vein of the original Frostpunk expansions, rather than system-focused updates as some had predicted. I'm excited to experience more of Frostpunk 2's intriguing post-apocalypse, to delve deeper into my futile stance against the end of the world.
Frostpunk 2 from 11 bit studios combines city-building, survival and strategy mechanics as it challenges players to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth with power-hungry humans.