As a big fan of the first Frostpunk, all I have to say is wow. It felt like things were built up from the first one and improved in a way that this game just ended up being quite legendary. The harsh choices needed to be made for survival were felt.
Frostpunk 2 has some rather visually pleasing cutscenes that add a bit of backstory. Along with some lore is the game's way of putting the player into the shoes of a struggling-to-survive community.
You can just tell from these visuals. That life trying to survive from one whiteout to the next is tough. That hard choices had to be made along the way that left the soul scarred for life. Your choice would be the ones left with you for life.
Frostpunk 2 has two kinds of modes you can pick from. You have story mode which is what I ended up playing to check this game out on. There is also an endless mode that they named Utopia Builder.
Once I selected story mode, I was given a choice of five different difficulties to choose from. You could either use a preset difficulty or go through each option and decide how hard you want each one to be from the economy to the weather.
I went with the default option since I did not know what to expect. You could further check if you wanted pop-up tutorials and/or survival mode enabled. I did not mind a refresher on how this game would be played. I felt having the tutorials enabled was quite worth it.
Unlike the first Frontpunk where you moved around in the storyline to different maps having to build up each one. Frostpunk 2 for the most part had you play from a single map with expanding bases that interacted within it.
I rather like the fact they even give you the option to skip the prologue. As this was just a small town the choices you made would not end up being with you for the rest of your gameplay. It was more like a tutorial town where you got to learn just the basics of putting down buildings and resource management.
I felt once you have done the prologue once and gotten a feel for the games. It鈥檚 one of those things you just don鈥檛 need to do again. You were given a small little town along with just basic goals and a time limit to finish them.
This seemed to be the game's way of easing you into things. As the first chapter and onward after would just keep opening up the game. While adding more things for you to manage, consequences for your actions, and situations.
As far as tutorials go the prologue and accompanying popups throughout my gameplay detailed enough so I could understand what was needed to be done. Along with not feeling too cumbersome. You could also at any time go back and revisit tutorial tips and the short little video that shows how to do things.
This game has a few different kinds of buildings in it. The main building types are seen as districts: housing, food, extraction, industrial, and logistics. You can expand each type out a little. Along with adding some special buildings to them depending on how many open slots they have for some rather profound effects on each district type itself.
Some of these extra buildings you can add can allow you to add housing to non-housing distracts. Increased food production causes an increase in disease. Allow you to drill and reach an endless recourse node and so on.
Some of the districts you build from food to extracting resources like coal have a limited amount before they become depleted. Once they are gone you can even salvage the building and put those resources into something else.
Everything also has its requirements to keep running. You are going to need at a bare minimum enough labor, and heat materials to keep everything going. This was the real struggle and quite a balancing act started to form in the game.
Thankfully you can micromanage things a bit. You can decide if a single district should be working emergency shifts. Perhaps even you lack the resources or storage capabilities that you rather have a single district only performing at 50% instead of 100%.
This is also where consequences start to come into play. If you have emergency shifts going on there is an increased chance of injury to death. Your people also start to feel you are not managing things well enough that you lose a little trust in using such options as well.
Resource is not the only thing you are trying to manage either. Within your town, there are many different factions all with different beliefs in how things should be run. Some want to fully automate everything while others see any such thing as depraved.
Thankfully the game gives you some details on each faction. You can see how large of a population they make up to how they think about you. You are even given some options to try and improve your relations with each faction from offering them funds, showing your support, and rewarding them in other ways.
You might also notice the second faction on the bottom has three red symbols across their icon. Me and that faction don鈥檛 get along. I鈥檝e attempted to destroy them a few times but they don鈥檛 seem to go below 4% of the total population.
Factions that are not in good standing with you can cause a lot of trouble. Those people have caused riots, and taken over sectors of the town. They also refuse to vote on things the way I want the town laws to be.
Many of these laws end up governing things like the type of buildings you can even have as add-ons to each of the distracts. Should child labor be used? Should people be required to have medical checkups? There are a lot of things. They all tend to have their own positive and negative effects on the town. Even more so if a faction of that town is hardline against something.
Every ten weeks the council is in session for ten weeks. While most of the time you can put up next to vote the law you want. If you don鈥檛 the different factions will attempt to pass laws that they favor. That in turn could be something you don鈥檛 want.
Like any interesting political situation. You can even attempt to sway votes. That requires making processes of some sort. That could include things like funding, allowing a faction to pick the next law to be voted on, or even researching projects they want.
For most of these things to even be voted on as a law in the first place. There needs to be some research done.
Thankfully one thing you do have a lot of control over is performing research. Each of the factions comes up with their ideas on how to solve an issue or create something. It鈥檚 you who gets to make the final choice.
This system is yet another one that has some heavy consequences. There is research in here that can end up causing or even stomping out riots. One faction might feel you keep favoring another one. You might have even needed to make a promise to one of the factions that you would research one of the many projects the way they wanted.
I ended up going quite heavily into the resources section of research. Researching things like housing, schooling, and hospitals was quite low on my priority list. After all, not having enough resources is the death of progress. Granted not having a school system also ends up creating a lot of crime you have to deal with down the line.
Research is also kind of a cheap way to get a faction to be in better standing with you. You might notice some of these have more than one research project completed in a single category like sawmills. It was easy to make the promise of research with no intent to use it to keep a faction happy.
As if that all was not enough to keep track of. You can even send out teams to explore around the map. They can find everything from stockpiles of resources, mines to gather from, and even other places to settle.
The cool part is you can send resources and people between towns. These outer towns are also a little less management required on your part. If you own the town, you do not have to worry about yet another faction uprising against you. Everyone in that town is just there to work on what you tell them. That thankfully keeps things from becoming quite overwhelming.
More times than not any towns I have tend to serve a single purpose. I have one that is all about mining oil and that is it. Sure, there were some small resources of other resources that they quickly consumed. They were however there to get the oil so the main town could survive a cold winter. Everything else they need I send them from the main town.
So far, I've been having a blast playing this one. So many things to do and manage. If only I could order a certain faction to be executed and run out of town. Things would become dare I say far too easy then.
Granted the town is only as strong as its ability to withstand the next whiteout. Over time resources like food and materials will be depleted. Perhaps it鈥檚 time for me to move on from the story mode into the endless mode.
When I'm not trying to rule things my way. I can often be found zoomed in on the different parts of the town itself. It was quite a thrill to watch the main town survive during the whiteout. Although the blizzard did not feel as intense as it did in the original Frostpunk.
Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Frostpunk 2.
Disclosure. A review copy of the game was received for free.
