As I said inmy The Alters preview, I’ve never been much of a survival game or city-builder fan. This was probably due to a fear that I would get too locked in and let them take over my life. Unfortunately, when I went to Warsaw to previewFrostpunk 2at 11 bit studios, this is exactly what happened. In fact, I got so locked in that I almost forgot to take notes, and bought the first game the moment I got home.
Frostpunk 2 builds directly on the foundations ofthe first, butin the best way. The first Frostpunk, which I have since developed a serious, time-sucking fixation on, is set during an apocalyptic climate catastrophe. Your job as the Captain of a group of survivors is to build a settlement called New London around a generator, keeping it fueled so your group doesn’t freeze to death, and ensuring there’s adequate healthcare, food, and warmth to keep everyone alive. You have to assign members of your settlement jobs, whether that be gathering resources from the area around your settlement, researching new technologies, working as a medic, or any number of other useful tasks.
It takes a more zoomed in approach on city-building, making you place individual buildings and build your settlement in small increments. Frostpunk 2, in contrast, is all about the macro, both mechanically and thematically. Taking place thirty years after the first game, the Captain is dead and you are the Steward. Resources are running low, and not only must you find a way to sustain the settlement you’ve built, but expand dramatically to deal with overpopulation. Because there are so many more people to deal with, you’re looking at a much larger-scale operation.
In practice, you’re looking at settlements from further away now, strategically placing whole districts on maps. The maps are much less rigid than in the first game too – where you were once working specifically on a circular grid, you’re now working with hex-shaped sectors that you must frostbreak to make accessible. You have to Frostbreak paths to collectible resources, and build districts around resource hotspots.
Before you could only send scout parties to locations in the Frostland to collect resources, but Frostpunk 2 allows you to zoom in to certain explorable areas in the Frostland and manually create smaller outposts. These act as mini-settlements in themselves, requiring you to ensure your scouts can sustain themselves as they collect resources and send them to New London. You can link these outposts by dragging what look like pins on the map, and later join these routes to create a pseudo-railway line of connected routes, maximising the efficiency at which you can send resources from outposts to your city.
Complicated? Yes! Initially, Frostpunk 2 can feel a little overwhelming, but like the first game, you get exponentially better at it with every failure. These outposts aren’t as hard to manage as your city, and don’t require a ton of upkeep – just make sure they’re sustainable and check in on them from time to time, and you’ll be alright.
Despite these expansions, the core experience remains the same, with a gameplay loop that revolves around keeping your people warm, alive, and nottooangry with you. But in keeping with its theme of expansion, there are new things you have to worry about. Previously, it had you choosing what laws to pass, which in turn shaped what your settlement looked like. You can choose to make child labour legal, freeing up more workers, or build shelters for them to stay in during work hours. You can choose to go full authoritarian and use propaganda and force to keep your people in line, or maybe go the religious route and convince your settlement that God wants them to snitch on each other.
As many previewers have noted after playing the demo, passing laws (or not passing them) has direct consequences on your city. For example, kids left to run amokwillstart fight clubs.
You’ll still be passing a lot of laws in Frostpunk 2, but there’s a semblance of democracy now. You’re no longer an overlord making decisions as you see fit, you’re a politician. Society has split into different factions that value different things – some want to stick more closely to tradition, and some want to find new ways to live and adapt to the environment. To pass laws, you have to select ideas in an Idea Tree, and each faction will likely approve of different ideas. You must spend scraps to research ideas before they can be enacted as law.
Still want to go the authoritarian route but worried you won’t have enough political support? Don’t worry, there are extremist groups that you can sanction or denounce as you please - you can still be totally evil if you want.
But the law-making process itself requires another layer of strategy, because of representative democracy. Every time you try to make a law, you’ll see how many citizens are for and against your law, as well as how many are undecided. to sway citizens to your side, you have to negotiate (or pressure them, but that’s unethical and also makes them angry at you). But in a world this ruthless, sometimes you need to take a darker route to get things done.
Negotiating will show which groups are open to persuasion and which are steadfastly against your decision – you may get them to vote for or against something by agreeing to their terms, like promising them funding for their projects or passing laws in their favour. Once you’ve got a vote distribution that could get your law passed, you hold a vote. Keep your promises, and everyone is happy – go back on your word and be ready for discontent and a refusal to cooperate with you in the future.
The difficulty level is on par with the first entry. I was advised before my preview that there’s no shame in playing on the easiest difficulty, which I did after dying thrice in the prologue. Other previewers told me later that because they’d never bumped the difficulty down, they’d spent more than half their playtime trying to get past the prologue, which tracks for this series. After restarting a couple of times because I’d tried too hard to make everyone get along – Frostpunk 2 makes it easy to pick a side, though there will be consequences – I managed to finish the preview build in the nick of time, though a QA tester did have to step in at the end and point out a crucial menu I’d missed so I could complete the first chapter.
Frostpunk 2 is just as compelling as its predecessor, and with its mechanical expansions alongside its improvements in graphics and UI (good god, the game looks beautiful), it’s shaping up to be one of my most anticipated games of the year. Be sure to check it out when it releases in July, though a word of advice: don’t let the kids run free.
Frostpunk 2
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11 bit studios' Frostpunk 2 blends city-building, survival, and strategy mechanics as it challenges players to survive on a post-apocalyptic Earth with power-hungry humans.
