Image: 11 Bit Studios
It’s hard to build a city from the ground up when it’s covered in snow, but Frostpunk 2 is all about challenges.
If you’re the kind of person who faces decision paralysis when doing something as simple as ordering off a menu, Frostpunk 2 might not be the game for you. Developer 11 Bit Studios has returned to the world of its 2018 city-building survival game Frostpunk - later turned successful boardgame - with a sequel this year, which tasks players with more or less the same objective as before: build up a city and help it survive catastrophe after catastrophe by making a series of difficult decisions.
As the city of New London's newly-elected leader, you’ll be forced to not only manage its resources and many competing factions - but the satisfaction of its citizens, and balancing their own wants and needs. Your plans can also unexpectedly go off the rails while the story builds up to seemingly unachievable deadlines, allowing Frostpunk 2 to maintain a steady and addictive sense of tension that keeps players glued to the screen - almost as if they weren’t building a city for its people, but rather in spite of them.
Breaking the ice
Image: 11 Bit Studios
Frostpunk 2 does one of my favourite things in gaming: disguising a tutorial mode as a story prologue. The game begins in alternate-reality 1886, where the British Empire has collapsed and left New London on the brink of annihilation. Under the leadership of a briefly-playable figure named the Captain, the city is brought back to life with the beating heart of a coal-fired generator and a rapidly growing populace. Unfortunately, the Captain dies a few years later, leaving you in the sticky position of becoming their replacement Steward.
The player gains control of New London at a terrible time. The city has been divided into factions and teeters on the edge of overpopulation, disease, and roughly 10 other disasters as the generator begins to run out of fuel. The rest of the campaign focuses on the Steward trying to bring New London to new and greater heights, while also resolving rising tensions in the city’s many factions and general populace. In doing so, they’ll have to decide what kind of leader they want to be.
Frostpunk 2 reminds me a lot of Cities: Skylines – the original that is, not its half-baked successor. The second you think you have a handle on things, more problems arise within and beyond the confines of the city, forcing you to think in a wider scope than you previously had. Add onto that a fairly compelling campaign, which sees a flailing city play political tug-of-war over the influence of its Steward for survival, and you have a very meaty 12-ish hours of story content.
Driven by a grim atmosphere and suspenseful story events, the campaign does a great job at giving the player new ways to engage with their city with higher and higher stakes attached to them. At the end of every session, I found myself pausing before exiting my game wondering if I had just done something to screw up my entire playthrough, owing to how meaningful and stressful every one of the campaign’s major decisions felt to execute.
Getting the cold shoulder
Frostpunk 2 is a game that seems overwhelming at first, but becomes deceptively simple so long as you understand that its entire purpose is to continuously throw wrenches into your well-laid plans. Players are given a few key resources to manage in New London to keep its districts and power generator up and running - ranging from an ever-elusive fuel source to items like ‘goods’, which encompass simple luxury items that keep the townspeople satisfied with their current quality of life. The second any of these resources dips below the minimum value required to maintain the city, you will see a snowball effect that eventually leads to a rapid decline in New London’s development begin to form – if you don’t act swiftly, that is.
For example, the second your city’s goods begin to decline, crime and death begin to crop up among your citizens. This leads to a sudden dip in population, which can then reduce your workforce, which will reduce the efficiency of your working districts while crippling your ability to construct more. The game’s core city-building mechanics ask players to walk on a delicate tightrope, where one wrong move ends the game for good. Alternatively, one could look at it this way: all that stands in the way of you and success is a sharp sense of focus.
That’s not all, however. A factions mechanic exists here as well, dividing New London’s population into multiple groups of people of varying size. One faction rarely agrees with the other on an issue, but one must endeavour to curry their favour equitably nonetheless. Passing laws allows the player to simplify certain problems - like reducing production time or dealing with all those corpses piling up within city walls. However, one needs an overwhelming majority of votes from representatives across all factions to pass a bill. That’s difficult to do if everyone hates you.
The game also constantly presents the player with different moral actions which ultimately decide the kind of Steward they’re going to be. Will you apply an authoritarian regime on London and force your will upon the city for the good of its survival? Will you approach problems democratically by listening to its people - as aberrant as their wants often are - and execute their will instead of yours? Will you stick to one specific set of factions and work to oust the others from political hand-wringing in the Council?
Personally, I found that the most moralistic decisions came with heavy consequences I was unwilling to bear, chipping away at my resources or erasing potential growth - forcing me to think of the city and only the city, instead of its people. After all, people can be replaced. When the city crumbles, it’s all over.
Balancing all these mechanics while improving the city can feel like an addictive session of plate spinning, but other elements of the game sadly do not fit into the puzzle quite as seamlessly. Frostpunk 2’s gameplay loop begins to wear thin when it asks you to manage multiple settlements simultaneously, causing the player to zoom out into a world map and zoom into a separate settlement, and continue switching between them and New London constantly.
In addition to this busywork, you also have to start sending resources to and fro settlements depending on what’s needed, and develop them all in service to New London. At some point, it stops feeling like you’re building a city - but a budding civilisation instead, somehow contained within the tenure of a singularly overambitious Steward.
The game’s controls and UI also border on obtuse at times, with pages of laws and research items left for players to trawl through, on top of hopping in and out of the world map to bounce between multiple settlements and finagling the in-game camera into allowing you to select the correct tiles. It’s understandable that the game struggles to present all of these features and mechanics to players in a concise way, but it does feel like it takes a lot more time to execute a specific action - like passing laws - than it needs to.
Verdict
Image: 11 Bit Studios
Frostpunk 2 is an addictive city-builder that doesn’t let up in either intensity or difficulty through the entirety of its main campaign. While the many systems it deploys in the service of New London’s construction seem at times overwrought, they do make up an engaging ecosystem for players to tap into. The godlike power fantasy this game offers might seem tantalising at first, but it is quick to confute the idea that power exists without responsibility, forcing the player to make difficult decisions in order to keep their city alive.
These decisions can snowball into dire in-game ramifications and mini-storylines, but either way, it feels almost impossible to escape the weight of your own power in Frostpunk 2. The temptation to wrest control of the city away from its populace is ever-present - even if it might lead to everyone’s downfall, including your own. After losing hundreds of New London citizens to disastrous levels of homelessness, starvation and disease, it’s also a solid reminder that I might not be cut out for politics.
I got us there, didn’t I? Not all of us, but still.
Frostpunk 2 is now available on PC and Mac. We received a copy of the game for this review.
