Frostpunk is the only city builder I have played that managed to tell an immersive story while also offering a gritty and satisfying gameplay. It wasn't about high scores or profit numbers we see with almost all games in the genre, it was a unique, narrative driven experience set at the end of the world. Six years later, 11 bit studios is back, and it has one hell of a sequel.
Although I do play most games in the city building genre as they launch, they don’t tend to stick with me for very long. I've realized I am not very good at the money making and destroying old parts of the city aspects these titles. Frostpunk's insistence of needing constant supplies and its rebuilding initiatives hits different though. Instead of the game bankrupting you, vast swathes of your population die off if you are slow to act. The survival of the human race depends on grim decisions, and my clueless butt is the one making them for this steampunk city. Perfect.
After spending almost 20 hours in the frigid lands of Frostpunk 2, I think I've seen enough of the game to give my thoughts on the experience. It turned out to be a gorgeous game with fresh and interesting mechanics built on top of the original’s brilliant ideas, though with annoying technical irritations. I've kept campaign spoilers to a minimum in this review.
Going wide or tall
The world has come to an end under a blanket of snow and ice. Except for a tiny city still being kept alive by a giant generator and stragglers in the wastes, everything is considered dead and gone. But now, with decades of surviving under its belt, the city of New London is finally ready to grow, and you’re the one in charge of this revolution. It’s a captivating setting from the start.
If you’ve played the original game, just knowing that the community you saved (hopefully) has managed to survive for this long is a satisfying feeling on its own; if you’re a new player, the premise is kept simple, and throughout its lengthy campaign Frostpunk 2 gradually introduces its new mechanics to slowly overwhelm you in the best way possible. The game is part city builder, part survival game, and part policy manager. Juggling between those aspects while making sure humanity survives is the end goal.
I’m not exactly sure who elected me to lead the final civilization of the world, but what’s the worst that could happen, right? Thankfully, 11 bit studios has a slow and steady start planned for players like me and brand-new arrivals to the series, showing off the new mechanics piece by piece.
To start, snow must be dug through hex by hex to make space for constructing districts of housing, food production facilities, coal mining shafts, and parts production factories. Building these in close proximity to each other can give benefits or negatives, like better heating or workforce, depending on the type of facility. Nobody likes living next to a fume spewing industrial plant, but close to the furnace or food crops is always appreciated.
There are separate hub buildings you can plonk down to further expand on this bonus stacking venture, with some skilled, almost organic, snake-like district placements being the most effective in my experience. Larger districts can also house buildings, which tailor the district for more specific tasks like having hospitals, watch towers for reducing crime, housing built straight into factories, and others.
Every decision comes with upsides and downsides, and you’ll be swapping these buildings out semi-regularly when the need arises.
Finding the possible answer to these challenges has you choosing between two paths early on: go deeper to access the larger reserves buried under everything, or go wide, and set up major outposts to create more supply for the main city. This even affects what kind of fuel you prefer for your ever-hungry furnace. You need at least a couple of playthroughs to see what could have happened choosing the other path of technologies. Whatever behemoth task you choose to take on, it’s filled with harsh lessons.
Campaign
Most city builders give you ample time to sit back, grab a drink, plan a bit for the future, evaluate buildings, and remake parts that weren't working out, all probably accomplished in the highest game speed available.
In Frostpunk 2, you’ll be hitting the space bar, which pauses the action, like it’s your favorite button. It is vitally important that research teams, the exploration teams, the snow digging teams, the construction teams, and every team you can think of, isn’t ever idling. Speeding through the world as weeks flip by in the always visible giant counter on the top left of the UI is always possible, but it will end up with either a dead city or an ousted leader quite rapidly, especially on higher difficulties.
This is a city builder that needs careful decision making, and there aren't many opportunities for do-overs unless you like reloading saves from hours ago. While you can also make many quick and rash rulings, like putting workers into overtime, dangerously overloading the generator, and perhaps passing an emergency law, it’s a tough battle to recover from spiraling issues. Still, going with the flow and finding solutions to survive by the skin of your teeth has a thrill of its own.
Nearly nothing in this post-apocalyptic landscape is unlimited. Crops only grow for a certain amount of time in the barely fertile soil, mines run out of resources, living quarters are miniscule, and the parts you salvage are from destroyed structures of the past. Everything has an expiry date, and if something’s usefulness runs out, it best be recycled, whether it be a building or a person.
Let’s not forget about the constantly frigid weather and sudden periods of cataclysmic cold, titled Whiteouts. All work stops and outside connections go dark until these deadly storms relent. Stocking up for these moments is crucial. I'd have my city finally in a state that's precarious but going towards stability, but just the announcement of an impending Whiteout will send my blood pressure up.
Hundreds of citizens freeze to death weekly, tensions rise to historic levels, talks of riots pop up from factions, and the city itself is about to implode from overusing the generator for squeezing out just a little bit more heat. And all that is happening in the first few minutes of a Whiteout, and they last for, at least what I felt like every time, forever. Surviving one feels amazing, like the world has thrown everything it can at my work, and even with its parts barely hanging on, my city and its people have come out the other side.
Sending out parties to map out uncharted areas outside the city is a necessary gamble. It's exciting to send scouts on their missions, carving out through the frozen wasteland, making trails, and seeing what's buried under everything. It could be supplies that can make the city last a few more weeks, some wildly valuable Cores that are needed for the most powerful upgrades for districts, or more people to bring in or turn away. Entire outposts can be set up in some instances, letting you build camps in gorgeous, mountainous landscapes.
Politics only happen in the main city, thankfully, but the outposts still need resources and heat to remain steady and provide resources for all. The game also lets you swap between your main city and these outposts rapidly. You can zoom out of your main city, swipe over to the other end of the wasteland, and zoom into an outpost’s structures seamlessly. An impressive feat.
Outside of the campaign, Frostpunk 2 also has the Utopia Manager, a number of fresh scenarios to tackle set across fresh landscapes with customizable factions and difficulties. Don’t let the name fool you though, the only utopia you’ll be building is a frosted over one if my experiences are anything to go by. Political battles and whiteouts are just as brutal in these massive levels, but scenarios (which can even be played in an endless mode) provide plenty of more content for anyone looking to continue their frigid city building escapades.
Faction politics and decisions
A major departure from the original game’s city management aspects is that you aren’t the absolute leader behind all decisions anymore. Changing laws requires a majority vote to happen from the council, a group of individuals representing the different political parties that have formed in our meager city.
No longer can you put chemicals into the food or have children work in the mines without at least some pushback. I was happy to see that, just like in real life, you can grease the palms of the opposing forces by promising extra funding or a future favor to tilt the votes in your favor. Frostpunk 2 has a range of communities, and you start with only a few, like the tradition following Lords or the technology averse Foragers.
As more and more pressure is put on the populace from natural elements and your political decisions, though, they can break off into new factions with more… fanatical outlooks. It's these new factions that can give very enjoyable but painful gameplay experiences in Frostpunk 2.
At points I was simultaneously dealing with protests against my leadership and campaigns praising it, from two different factions of course, as I had favored one a bit too much in my technology-focused march to save my city. I even sent my supporters to counter protest the other group, which ended with bloodshed and even more recruits joining from the larger, less aggravated, but sympathizing communities. If city stability falls too low from all this chaos, it’s game over. The passable laws section does have several ‘authoritative options’ available to cull any major opponents if you want to go that route.
Almost all decisions, may it be a technology, political, or even a simple choice regarding a random event, has some sort of curveball later. This could be a civil event pressuring that a harsh law has to be amended somewhat – like giving parents visitation rights to children being raised by the state – or pressure from another faction to elect their version of the law instead, such as one that discourages machine usage in factories to give regular people more jobs.
What I really liked to see was that sticking to your guns even with opposing forces telling you otherwise is still a valid tactic. When the going gets tough, it also becomes time to force the city and its people to push themselves as hard as they can. This can mean opting to enable overtime across factories, passing laws that harm health but increase production or heat, overcrowding houses, and even overclocking the one thing that's keeping everyone alive: the generator. All these can have massive consequences if kept up long enough, but if that means saving the city and civilization, would it be worth it? That's what the game asks of you. There aren't any wrong decisions here, just whatever is necessary.
While you must cater towards the existing population’s factions in the early game, when the city slowly grows from fresh arrivals from the wastes outside, you have to evolve and perhaps shy away from old alliances. The decisions aren’t solely political ones either. When I needed to increase the number of active workers and production efficiency in a pinch, the suggestion to enact Mass-Produced Goods law was a great one.
Focusing on the quality of goods at that point seemed insane. However, once things stabilized later, opting to switch to Durable Goods law that ensures goods last longer was the better idea. Of course, the parties in favor of the original idea can add this as another reason to hate me for this decision, making me look towards the new generation that I had dismissed before in a new light.
Games like Cities: Skylines can have small little text pop up from time to time with snippets like how garbage is filling up in streets or there's a lack of parks, but Frostpunk 2 has much more "cheerful" messages like '300 workers lose limbs from too much overtime' or '12 children pass away from street brawl'. Always very motivating messages to come back to when managing a city.
Visuals, audio, and performance
Frostpunk 2 is absolutely gorgeous. From the moment you start the game, the frosty theme is implemented beautifully across the visual style and even the UI. The snow-covered landscapes with tips of mountains still peaking through. The steampunk technologies light up New London as citizens and robots light up New London’s tight streets. Even the gorgeous map that you send your scouts to navigate is always a visual treat.
The music is industrious and slow for the most part, giving you an appropriate cold and haunting tempo to build your cities and pass your laws with. When temperatures rise and fall, laws come into effect, or new matters require your attention, the sounds used for notifications are more like groans and deep thuds, as if the next decision you make is your last one.
Actual announcements from megaphones ring out across the city when a major decision has just been made. It's satisfying simply to hear the slow churn of the instrumental track when the game is paused. But it's when Whiteouts hit that everything kicks into high gear. Violins pick up as the tempo of the music slowly increases, giving you the sense of urgency as the city hunkers down, sounds deaden, and only emergency lights appear as the blizzard conditions worsen. This is easily the best sound and visual design I've in the city building genre.
Performance can be a little troublesome though, but not at first. I ran the game on a Lenovo Legion 5 Pro RTX 3060 Laptop GPU. It has 6GB of VRAM, an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, and 16GB of RAM, with the game running at 1440p while installed on an NVMe SSD. Even looking over the most taxing cities with dozens of hours put into them, I was managing to get around 40FPS easily running on a mix of medium and high graphics settings when starting a save. But as the hours go by, the frame rate slowly tanks to the 20s, making a restart the fastest option to get back into the smooth action. Even brand-new cities’ 70FPS start drops to 30s in the same time frame. Hopefully some future updates can alleviate this issue.
I had a love and hate relationship with the UI. On the good side, the black on white aesthetic is clear and concise, with almost every option having tooltips and further explanations at the press of a button. While district buildings can be a little fiddly at times, the color-coded areas are easy to learn.
One of the most impressive decisions 11 bit studios have made is to have a handy contextual shortcut that can pull up a page on what you're pointing your cursor at. Just hovering over any menu item, map resource, district, or any point of interest and pressing T will pull up this in-game encyclopedia with the relevant page already selected. It's genius, and I wish more city building and strategy games would have a feature like this.
At the same time, the UI loves to fight with me now and then. Some elements that pop up, like district information, can go halfway out of the screen when I click to open them, making me wrestle with the camera to find an angle to see what the hell I am looking at. Next, pressing one of the options available in the build menu usually sends you to the research tab instead because the buttons are somehow overlapping.
Building upgrades also requires a separate menu instead of selecting one from a district I’m already looking at, and no information is given on how many of any building or upgrade already exist in the city. Information is also delivered with words like marginally, significantly, or something is slightly increased or decreased. An actual number or a slider to show how much things will change with actions is what I’m looking for.
It’s little things like this that can get frustrating while playing such a well-built game.
Conclusion
The hunger for more warmth, stability, room, and hope is what drives this final civilization, and the Steward, that’s you, is what’s guiding them. Picking sides with the factions that rise to the top of the food chain to lead their populations adds an additional amazing layer to what made the original Frostpunk great, showing how a council in turmoil can bring a city down faster than the actual end of the world.
Everything from the new district building and managing multiple outposts, to the exciting council votes, Frostpunk 2 delivers plenty of innovation that takes you to the edge of being an overwhelming experience but keeps being a joy to come back to. I don’t want to know how many harsh decisions I agonized over about children, workers, and technologies in my time with the game, but seeing my city slowly become a place worth living in was a proud achievement.
The game isn’t without its share of issues. Like I’ve talked about, the UI is something I was fighting with. The camera cutting off elements, buttons overlapping causing misclicks, and just the lack of solid information on city statistics was annoying to say the least, especially for a city builder. The performance issues with frame rates slowly going down as the hours went by was another sticking point. The gameplay and storyline were so engrossing though, I didn’t mind pushing past these issues.
Frostpunk 2 gets a massive recommendation from me. I have never seen such unique gameplay and storytelling aspects to appear from a city building entry. The studio has expanded and built upon almost everything that made the original game a great one without lessening the impact.
Frostpunk 2 launches on September 20 on PC via Steam, GOG, Epic Games Store, and Microsoft Store with a $44.99 price tag. It will also be available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass as a day-one launch on Windows. Those pre-purchasing the Deluxe Editions can jump into the game three days early starting on September 17.
This review of Frostpunk 2 on PC was conducted on a pre-release copy of the Steam version provided by 11 bit studios.
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