I thought I was done reviewing city builders, but I couldn't not mention Frostpunk. It's interesting how the different city builders have different focus and complementary mechanics. While games of this genre have always had choice, Frostpunk's management aspects are more inspired by narrative RPGs. There's definitely a shade of fellow Polish series, The Witcher, here.
As a city builder, Frostpunk is not trying to emulate SimCity or Cities Skylines. It's all about streamlining the city building experience. We have seen games like Anno 1800 try to do too much at once, Frostpunk takes a different route. As a result, Frostpunk's city building is well polished and balanced, but lacks the depth and detail you'd expect. Everything build around the core in a circle - a rather interesting solution at simplifying zoning, definitely feels like an assist. It's all about walking a fine balance between offering an experience that builds the narrative convincingly, and one that detracts from it. Frostpunk does an excellent job here - the city building immerses you into the world, but never gets too complicated so as to detract from its main focus. Another tight rope is immersing you in a desperate, dark and dour world, while at the same time, being enjoyable to play. In this regard, Frostpunk is definitely not for everyone - it depends if you like playing games with such worlds.
Frostpunk's main focus is very much a feeling of playing a post-apocalyptic RPG. There's excellent lore, music and atmosphere here that really immerses you. The game looks stunning yet desperate at the same time, with its icy, makeshift aesthetic. But the RPG influences really become obvious as the game's main gimmick is throwing very difficult choices throughout the game. Sure, city builder and management games often allow freedom of choice, but Frostpunk's dilemmas are very much like something out of The Witcher series. The choices are usually binary, between two terrible choices. Again, this type of mechanic may not be for everyone, but Frostpunk pushes the boundaries of how terrible the choices can be, in a good way.
Yet, through every one of Frostpunk's scenarios, there's always a glimmer of hope, and a gentle humanity to its writing. This is probably the first city builder with a top notch narrative, and I'd love to see more of these.
There are multiple endings, which have proven to be rather controversial. The game judges you on your choices, and if you take too many brutal decisions, it'll lead to a "bad ending". This caused outrage in certain cultures, and accused the game of being western and liberal biased. Very intriguing, indeed!
If there was a city builder I'd recommend to people who don't really enjoy city building, this would be it. As a bonus, it works surprisingly well on consoles with a controller, something that has always been tedious for city building. The game has much in common with series likes The Witcher, Fallout and Metro. It's just that the primary mechanic here is not combat, but rather city building.