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Frostpunk 2 review: I became a dictator because everyone was so goddamn annoyingOld town snowed
Old town snowed
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/11 bit studios
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/11 bit studios
Frostpunk 2was an ambitious gambit. With survival achieved, and the introduction’s excellently sinister advisor whispering evil Tory ideas, the whole city you built inFrostpunkis now just the headquarters for a sprawling expansion effort, and your rule is no longer absolute. Rather than retread the same “prepare for ultra-Winter” ground, your biggest obstacle will likely be your own people, now formed into shifting political parties, and looking outward with colonial eyes. The result is a complicated, laborioussurvivalcitybuilder that’s two parts compelling, and one part frustrating for the wrong reasons.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/11 bit studios
One faction smugly went outside during a whiteout against my orders, in order to bring back food when we already had three times what we needed. When the time finally came to decide whose grand plan I’d enact, the other faction complained that it was getting them killed, and started sabotaging the buildings that prevented the exact deaths they were protesting.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/11 bit studios
All the while you’re wrangling factions, see, you’re also building (visually similar) districts around the city to gather resources, ideally around bonus-applying hubs, with expansion buildings attached to customise districts to a rather complicated degree. Maybe you’ll convert materials into coal, and that into oil. The factories could recycle some material, the housing could have a guard post, hospital, or prison, the logistics district an expansion that helps its explorers work faster on the map. Many of these enable special actions that might trigger an event, and don’t forget they all might please a faction and nudge the zeitgeist somewhere. Oh and your eastern colony is out of food and the other one’s stockpile is full, and the council voted without you. No, we didn’t tell you this or reassign those workers for you. We were too busy pausing the game with indistinguishable audio alerts (but still making you scroll around the map to find its source), and pop-up messages that disappear if you press the spacebar that’s also pause.
You build colonies, too. Many locations provide resources or immigrants, subplots with multiple resolutions, and occasionally a colony site, which you build from scratch like the city, then keep on top of balancing exports and stockpiles and potentially ongoing events. Its world map suffers the same fate as post-Frostpunk survival builders like Endzone andNew Cycle; parts take focus away from the settlement, and other parts are a reductive, forgettable chore. And all the while, you’re getting interruptions. Some legislation had consequences, will you amend it? A man has some (great) flavour text. The problem you already solved is still solved. The nomads are grateful you sacrificed lots of oil and now they want a large supply of oil that you don’t have because you gave it up oh my god fuckoff.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/11 bit studios
It’s very cool that there’s so much detail that specific combinations of laws can cause unique problems. It means the mere possibility of unintended consequences makes you wary of things that seem mechanically useful. But it is all far, far too much. I was crying out for someone to delegate to within two chapters, and though I’m curious to see alternative endings and events, the process of building and finding resources andmanually adjusting every single districtwhen population drops is too exhausting a prospect for a society I have little reason to care about without the motivating threat of annihilation. All that’s left is expanding for its own sake. I don’t thinkanybodyhas a sustainable plan here, and there’s nobody to like.
I want to love Frostpunk 2, and I think that’s precisely why so much of this review is negative. It deserves recognition for the courage to push into something new rather than play it safe. It’s far more compelling, interesting, and super atmospheric than its peers, but that ambition has cost it a singular intensity and focus that leaves its fresh narrative and design too contradictory to carry it to the same heights.
