We all love strategy games. Most of us love the vastness of such games, the wide variety of terrains, maps, and a myriad of buildings, troops, vehicles, and much more. Talk about the Anno franchise, Roller Coaster Tyccon, or the all-time favorite Age of Empires. But, a few years back Frostpunk came into the picture and changed it all. And the recently released Frostpunk 2 takes it to the next level. Let’s glance at the good, the bad, and the best about it.
The Overview of Frostpunk 2
Frostpunk 2 was a bold venture. After achieving survival and hearing the wonderfully evil adviser from the opening muttering dark Tory thoughts, the entire Frostpunk city you built is now merely the base of operations for a massive expansion project, and your rule is no longer unassailable.
The Challenge of Gameplay
Instead of simply repeating the “get ready for ultra-winter” mantra, your largest challenge will probably come from inside, as your people are now divided into multiple political factions and are viewing the outside world through colonial lenses. The end product is a painstaking and complex survival city builder that is at once captivating and infuriating for all the wrong reasons.
Put simply, it’s more political. Even if your predecessor was a monster, it was obvious that everyone would suffer a terrible death in the absence of any brutal leadership. This is less assured, therefore you have to rely on openly negotiating with the emerging social groups, who vote on every bill directly and even put out their own. Apart from their practical implications, all laws, buildings, and research endeavors steer the ‘zeitgeist’ towards one of six values, such as Equality, Tradition, and Adaptability. Factions hold varying values, and the radical ones can be distinguished by their opposing strategies for utilizing all the resources you will be taking from the planet.
In Frostpunk 2, Winterhome is ready for colonization
There are too many ways for you to describe how you and the factions can interact at the same time and not enough time to take meaningful action to address the grave issues they will undoubtedly bring down the road. Politically speaking, the early chapters are simple since you just have to give everyone the things you already desire in exchange for laws that establish the kind of society you desire. However, near the middle of the game, the majority of factions desired things that would only cause chaos. Specifically, they persisted in their attempts to overturn the regulation that cut our fuel usage in half in favor of an entirely pointless stream of building supplies—they don’t realize that they are actually freezing to death and voting away the heat.
Is there an Issue with Frostpunk 2?
It depends on what you are signing up for. The issue is that Frostpunk 2 turns into a management game about leadership when it moves from survival to realpolitik, but it doesn’t provide you with the tools to lead effectively. The fact that players can win the game as soon as the game allows them simply round up both radical factions.
The Stalwarts were accountable for 85% of our deaths, while the others attempted to use eugenics on the “weak” and turn all women into breeding slaves and children into soldiers—is telling.
Fraction Management and Buildings in Frostpunk2
As you manage factions, you’re also developing (visually like) districts across the city to collect resources; these should ideally be built around hubs that impart bonuses. You can link expansion buildings to these districts to customize them to a very intricate degree. It’s possible that you will turn resources into coal, and coal into oil.
A security station, hospital, or jail might be located in the housing, the manufacturers could recycle some material, and the logistics area could be expanded to enable its explorers to work more quickly on the map. Many of these allow for unique actions that could set off an event, and remember that they could all appease a group and shift the zeitgeist in some way. And the colony on the east has run out of food, and the colony on the other side has a full stockpile, and the council met without you. No, we didn’t reassign those employees to you or inform you this. We were too preoccupied with putting the game on hold with indiscernible audio alerts (which still require you to navigate the map to locate their source) and pop-up notifications that vanish as you hit the paused spacebar.
Colonies construction
You also construct colonies. Numerous sites offer resources or immigrants, multi-resolution subplots, and sometimes a colony site that you construct from the ground up, like a city, then maintain equilibrium between exports and stockpiles and possibly ongoing events. Like post-Frostpunk survival builders like Endzone and New Cycle, the world map is a tedious nuisance in some areas and detracts from the settlement in others. And throughout it all, there are disruptions. Will you change some legislation that has consequences? A dude possesses some (amazing) flavor text. You get to explore it all when you play the game.
Difficulties of Frostpunk 2
The fact that there is so much complexity and that different combinations of laws might result in different difficulties is really cool. It means you are cautious about things that appear mechanically useful just because they may have unforeseen repercussions. However, it is all simply too much. Within two chapters, a player might be looking for someone to delegate to, and while interested in alternate outcomes, the prospect of manually adjusting each district when the population declines and building and finding resources is too taxing for a society.
Summing it up
As said above, you may like or dislike Frostpunk 2 based on your choice and preference. The game deserves praise for having the guts to take a risk rather than stay safe. Although it is significantly more captivating, fascinating, and atmospheric than its contemporaries, its ambition has cost it a unique intensity and focus, making its original story and design too conflicting to elevate it to the same levels.
