The majority of successful game sequels are safe, conservative extensions of the original concepts, while Frostpunk 2 is a daring sequel that approaches its city-building technique in a nearly completely different way. It takes place on the same desolate, frozen-over planet where people fight to survive, but it’s nice that we’re not seeing the same old frozen landscape. Everything about it, from building layout to resource management to city heating, is unique, and its political structure is a clever method to engage with the people of New London while effectively evoking the idea of quid pro quo negotiation in a representative democracy. Although the intimacy that sets the first game apart is lost due to the zoomed-out perspective, there are still plenty of ethically dubious choices to be made while creating your society.
Thanks to the icy weather effects and dramatic music that intensifies as the tension in your city rises, the atmosphere is very chilly. At first, seeing people strolling about the streets was something I was missing as I had just played through the first Frostpunk rerun. But, people do occasionally make hilarious observations about current events over the loudspeaker, and they do comment on your behavior, so it doesn’t feel like a ghost town. With its blanket of white snow and ice, the map is fairly uniform, but it also has features like mountains and cliffs that give each area a unique appearance. As you construct, the map becomes much more colorful with its intricate districts and automatically generated power lines that pulse red when tension is high.
There isn’t much of a plot in the five-chapter Story mode, but it does act as a sort of tutorial for the sandbox Utopia Builder mode save from a few brief cutscenes. As you take control of New London, there isn’t much to this game other than a straight line connecting the events of the first game and this one. Most of the narrative consists of poignant, short vignettes of life in the freezing wastes. Learning to locate and grow multi-tile districts for industry, housing, food production, resource/fuel extraction, and logistics—each with a separate set of upgrade structures and single-tile hub buildings with adjacency bonuses—covers a lot of ground.
With a few dubious peculiarities, it’s an intriguing city-building challenge.
A fascinating city-building puzzle with a few dubious features is this one: While the frost-breaking mechanism makes sense in the fiction, it feels like busywork that merely slows down how quickly you can go forward with a plan. To construct a batch of tiles, you must first clear them away. The inability to move a single tile without destroying the district and starting again is also annoying, but at least you receive all of your resources back, so the only thing you lose is time.
The primary elements of the enormous and even more desolate Frostlands map are the clockwork emblems for your colony and outposts, which have a strong Game of Thrones influence. As you send your scouts on dispatch missions to investigate, they come upon these and bring back a large number of the inhabitants and resources you’ll need to maintain your colony. Compared to the first Frostlands, this one is far more developed. To maintain New London, you have to build roads to connect the materials you locate there and bring back a constant supply of them. You also have to find and upgrade new outposts and even entire satellite colonies.
The primary issue I had with this was that, when you’re not in your main city, you are unable to view your factions at the bottom of the screen. This means that should something go wrong while you’re developing your resource operation, it may spiral out of control before you realize it. Furthermore, since the Frostland maps can get very large and searching for areas where my scouts have just completed a mission takes too long, I would have loved to be able to zoom out even farther.
Although it can occasionally get more difficult in a few significant ways, the task of meeting the fuel needs of your colony’s central generator and maintaining the city’s supplies of food, materials, and heat is generally standard and easy for supply chain games. For starters, there are occasionally severe Whiteout storms that completely wipe out the Frostlands map, upsetting supply systems and forcing you to live off of your stockpiles for several months. This implies that you must overproduce to prevent your people from freezing to death by the hundreds; you cannot simply produce enough to keep the lights on.
Speaking of freezing, I did run into a few interface bugs, like the need to repeatedly click on some dialogue options before they would register. Occasionally, the user interface’s buttons would overlap, causing clicks to register on the button beneath rather than the one that was more visible on top. The fact that it locks up for a few seconds when an autosave is also a little bothersome, but nothing serious happened. However, it’s important to keep in mind that, similar to most games of this kind, performance tends to decrease as the population grows.
Frostpunk 2 has a lot of opportunities for replays.
But I can’t help but think that by going from the small-scale viewpoint of the previous game to a multi-colony huge image, where you can only see your people when you press a button to make a close-up to watch a few of them walking around, we’ve lost something significant. For example, it is not as impactful to see a message appear stating that 93 children perished in a mine collapse when it quickly disappears with no apparent consequences. When those kids never even had names that I could view in the graveyard, unlike in Frostpunk, it was much easier for me to think of them as mere numbers on a spreadsheet. Simply put, Frostpunk 2 is too large for that.
“Take a step back,” one may say. “In the first place, why were 93 kids in a mine?” I’m happy you asked, though. As Steward of New London, I made a wise decision when I sent them in to gather coal inaccessible to adults, which was made possible by my decision to go with an apprenticeship system rather than mandated schooling for youngsters because it boosted my workforce. Blazing the path clear was the choice, but that would have left me with less coal. Nobody could have predicted that scheme would go awry!
Forstpunk 2 is always throwing decisions like that at you and then serving up consequences, often making me feel a little dirty for picking the one that gave me the boost the spreadsheet said I needed despite the human cost. So while it might not land the punches as effectively, it certainly takes a lot of swings, and those add up.
Verdict
In Frostpunk 2, establishing numerous colonies, investigating new technology, and enacting legislation can be extremely complex tasks. Almost everything you do will inevitably infuriate some faction in your city, and a strong storm can both physically and metaphorically freeze your whole economy. This is a follow-up city-building game that, while it may have lost some of the intimacy of the first one by thinking bigger, makes up for it with an ambitious philosophy of reinvention rather than repetition, allowing you to play it right after the first one without feeling like you’ve seen most of it before.
