By Chris Picone, 26 September 2024

I played the original Frostpunk in January last year and it's been living rent-free in my head ever since.  I'd fire up a game after dinner and play through until the sun came up - a poignant experience where it felt like I was there with the Frostlanders, curled up under a blanket, toiling to survive the night.  The experience could get quite intense as the stakes kept climbing, and just as everything seemed insurmountable, just as the cold was really starting to settle in and the bodies would start piling up, the sun would break and we'd all survived another day.  I've found Frostpunk 2 to be a very different experience and, while I'm going to review the game in its own light, I will spend a solid chunk of my review discussing those differences.  There are similarities, sure, but I think anyone going into the sequel expecting a repeat of the original is setting themselves up for failure.  In the early lead-up, right back when 11 bit studios first started teasing the sequel, the developers made it very clear that they planned to take the sequel in a different direction. There's the expected logical technological progression.  Time has passed since the original and of course having a new fuel source and tech tree to explore opens up fresh gameplay for any veterans of the original.  More importantly, however, the plan was to make the game on a much larger scale, and that's exactly what they've done.  The upside to this is you now get to have a go at building a huge sprawling city that was only previously possible in the Endless Mode (now Utopia Mode).  It also means that, as the game's now about expansion rather than survival, the exploration and world map aspect of the game plays a much bigger part than ever before.  The downside is that, now that the scope is so grand, it can at times seem impersonal.  Where in the original you mourned the loss of every death or amputee, in the sequel you'll watch them come and go by the hundreds.  Time is measured in days and weeks rather than hours. The other major conceptual change to the game is that your role as Captain is over - you now play the part of Steward.  Politics already played a huge part in Frostpunk but its role in the sequal is pivotal; completely integral to the plot.  

Note:  Be sure to check back on this page in the future - I will absolutely add reviews for Frostpunk 2 DLC here when they release!

Story

Frostpunk 2's story plays out similarly to the original's, in that the campaign pushes you through a prologue and 5 chapters, each introducing new problems - and new mechanics to try to solve them.  The story picks up roughly 30 years after the events in the original Frostpunk.  Mind you, that's 30 years of surviving whiteout after whiteout. This is crucial to the gameplay: Unlike in the first Frostpunk, the people are now very adept at surviving, and for many the apocalypse has become what generations now only know as normal living conditions.  You'll still have to prepare and stockpile resources for whiteouts (or one, at least), but they're no longer world-ending. And the people have been busy over the last thirty years; they've improved heat distribution networks, embraced automation, and installed rail systems.   The Captain (the player & overlord from the original) has died and been replaced by you, the Steward.  At the very start of the game you will have to choose between Order and Faith, which essentially plugs you into the endgame from Frostpunk 1.  Early in the game you discover an oil-powered generator and your engineers quickly work to adapt New London's machine to utilise the newer and far more plentiful fuel source.  For the first time, you need to consider what the future might look like, rather than just struggling to survive.  While the Captain ruled with an iron fist, as Steward you can only retain your position by maintaining the people's trust in your rule.  Not an easy feat to achieve when competing interests are involved.  Much of your story stems from this challenge:  The Stalwarts wish to expand New London as a central hub, a huge warm metropolis in which humanity can thrive.  The Pilgrims, however, see folly in pinning all of human life to a single point of failure and urge for expansion; to explore the Frostland for other suites that might be suitable for colonisation. These are the factions you will fac eif you chose Order. If you chose Faith at the start, essentially the Faithkeepers are the religious version of the Stalwarts, and the Evolvers their logical opposition.  Your city holds two other competing factions; the New Londoners - families who have been born generationally in the city; and Frostlanders - survivors from the wasteland who have come to settle in the beacon of hope that is New London.  These factions make up the vast majority of your population but what the Pilgrims/Evolvers and Stalwarts/Faithkeepers lack in size they make up for in zeal.    One way or another, you'll have to choose, and one faction's going to be very unhappy about your decision.

Aesthetics

Frostpunk 2's visuals are almost identical to the original's in terms of quality and style. The UI is very similar, although Frostpunk 2's is just a little more polished, a little prettier, with greater use of animated symbols (tension, for example, is a small globe which will fill and begin bubbling more aggressively as tension rises) to identify the state of affairs and mouse-over tooltips hiding the rest of the detail.    It takes some getting used to but it's actually very clear and efficient while utilising a minimal approach so you can focus on your city.  The world map with its frozen landscape and symbolic checkpoints is the same as the original, as are the chapter, technology, event, and council dialogues.  The one real visual distinction between the two games is in regard to the sequel's much grander scale.  No longer do your forlorn but tenacious Frostlanders trudge well-worn paths through the snow to report to work.  Instead machines can be seen scouring the land and breaking the frost and flashes of red zip across the screen periodically as trains shuttle workers from housing districts to work sites and materials from mines to industrial districts for processing. A constant glow from generators and heat lamps can be seen throughout your city, even in the coldest weather, and it can be quite a sight - especially when your city goes through a whiteout.  It's beautiful and impressive but does detract from the sense of frozen desolation that was so pervasive in the original. 

Gameplay

Whatever else you do, don't go into Frostpunk 2 expecting to play a continuation of Frostpunk 1.  The first thing you'll probably notice is that the main resources have changed slightly.  In the original you were worried about coal, wood, steel, and food.  Coal's still important in Frostpunk 2 but you also have oil (and even steam!) as possible alternative fuel sources.  Food's also still important, but you no longer have to fuss over micromanaging cooked meals and rations.  Wood and steel have now been bundled into "materials," which you now need to convert into either prefabs (which are used to repair and build new districts and improvements) and goods (clothing and other consumer products that keep your citizens happy).  There's also a new resource, "heat stamps," which are a sort of tax-based generic currency income that is used for absolutely everything (researching, exploring, building). Mechanically, it acts as a sort of bottleneck - as a trickle-based resource, heat stamps are often the only thing that limit the rate of your expansion and progression.  Each resource is also tied to your city's key condition states. For example, a fuel shortage could lead to a lack of heat (and eventually death), although in the original, in Frostpunk 2 that's a problem you're likely to solve fairly early on.  A lack of goods can lead to higher rates of crime and lower trust in your rule.  A shortage or prefabs slows your rate of expansion and also prevents you from repairing districts, leading to outages and shutdowns.  

The next thing you'll notice is that the main play space in the original - the rings of building space radiating around the hub where you would have built all your houses and hospitals, machine shops and cook houses - is already full.  This is now known as the central district, and it's already well-established.  This means that your starting city is already as big as probably the biggest city you would have built in the first game.  Also, the radial grid is gone altogether, replaced with a hex-tile system.  I was a little sad to see this gone, at first, as I felt it was an interesting aspect of the original game that felt really unique and fun to play with.  But the hex system does make more sense with the game's expansionistic focus.  The micromanagement of trying to connect your city by building streets is gone also; you'll now be building whole districts rather than individual buildings so all these little details are now just built into the system.  It pays to plan ahead.  Before you can build anything you need to send out frostbreaking teams to clear the way; this takes up precious time and resources.  You can frost break 8 tiles at a time and each district takes up 6 tiles. When you build your district you need to consider synergy; housing districts share their warmth with neighbours while extraction and industrial districts can create squalor. You need to deliberately leave some space between districts to place maintenance, heating, and other hubs which will benefit all around them.  You also need to leave enough space to allow for expansion.  Districts can be upgraded twice; doing so makes them more productive (housing upgrades to dense and finally high rise housing), and also provides a slot that allows you to build a specialist building, but each upgrade requires an additional three tiles.  

Upgrades are of course tied to technology, and I definitely want to spend a moment giving Frostpunk a huge shout for having one of the best technology trees in any game I've played.  The order in which you research new technologies will be very much dictated by your needs at the time.  There's a whiteout coming and we need to ensure we have enough fuel to survive?  Then we should research either new oil mining techniques to speed extraction, or else improve the insulation on our housing to raise our base temperature and reduce our ongoing fuel requirement.  Running low on resources?  Time for the deep melting drill, which won't increase our output but will provide near limitless supply.  Have enough warmth and food?  Time to focus on exploration.  Scout training will make new areas accessible while frontier footholds reduce the manpower needed to man outposts, freeing up your scouts so you can cover more ground and secure more supplies.  However, each new technology you research comes with more than one option, and there's rarely a clear winner.  For example, when researching more efficient worker shifts, you can opt for "weather-adjusted" or "machine-centric" shifts. Weather-adjusted shifts increases production efficiency while machine-centric reduces workforce requirements.  The majority of technology choices also come with a downside too, often a choice between an increase in disease or an increase in squalor.  Technology isn't always immediately unlockable in a linear fashion.  Each technology is linked to a trait (tradition, progress, merit, equality, reason, or adaptation). You may have to progress your research further into one of these areas before more advanced technology becomes available to you - so sometimes your decision will be based on future desires rather than immediate needs.  But there's still more: The tech tree in Frostpunk is also tied to the political system.  

Politics plays a huge part in Frostpunk 2, even more than it did in the original.  Each of the factions are aligned with three of the traits.  Every decision you make with one of those traits makes them happy and brings an increase in trust, and of course the opposite is true. Some decisions come in the forms of the laws that you pass.  Others, through your reactions to events that occur throughout the game.  As technology is linked to the traits, you will also have to factor the wants and needs of your citizen factions into your research, and may occasionally have to research new technology or pass new laws that you neither want nor even necessarily agree with, in order to keep the peace.  In any case, the factions are uncompromising on their values and since their values are in competition with each other, you will never ever be able to keep everyone happy all of the time.  So while you'll aim to keep the peace, you will need to play favourites to some extent.  I haven't yet played the Faith campaign but for Order: The Stalwarts are a fuddy bunch; they want things to stay as they've always been, just bigger and more of it.  They're a safe bet for the most part, but their idea of the future may not be as safe or as bright as they think it is.  On the other hand, the Pilgrims are a pack of absolute lunatics.  Don't get me wrong; their ideas are actually pretty sound, but that's still a tough sell when the ideas are sprung from drug-induced seances and spirit journeys into the frozen wasteland.  Understandably, aligning yourself with the pilgrims will cause problems with the other factions and bring the soundness of your leadership into question.  However, because they are a mob of fanatics, they're also very quick to riot and set entire districts on fire any time they don't get their own way.  Their idea of the future might be the brightest, but is it worth the risk? 

The final point of gameplay I wanted to talk about is the huge scope of the sequel compared to the original. I already mentioned that your game starts with a city as big as your endgame city from the original, and that you will continue to build whole districts as you play, but there's even more than that.  As you explore the frozen wilderness your scouts will not only locate supply caches and pockets of survivors but sometimes other whole communities, other resource centres vast enough that you will build outposts on them, and even new sites that you will colonise and settle.  That's right: New London will not be your only city.  Early in the game you will send colonists to establish a second home around Dreadnought, a crashed train with a functioning generator that's located near a vast oil supply.  And I don't want to give away spoilers but you will also have the opportunity to develop at least two other settlements.  You will need to manage all of these settlements simultaneously - a real challenge.  Fortunately, colonists tend to be a little easier to keep happy than the factions vying for power back in New London, so you won't need to worry about tension or politics in your other settlements so much.  What you will have to manage, however, is ensuring your colonists have adequate housing, warmth, and food, and are being looked after well enough to keep them happy and free of crime and squalor so they can flourish while extracting precious resources for you.  Luckily, in Frostpunk 2 you are able to connect all your outposts and settlements via permanent tracks or skyrails, allowing for rapid shipment of resources and workers.  So you'll send oil from Dreadnought to New London, for example, in return for precious materials and goods that they are unable to produce effectively in the colony.  It's pretty awesome. 

Fun Factor / Replayability

I would suggest the average player will get at least two solid run-throughs out of Frostpunk 2, possibly four, and potentially even more.  At the outset you must choose whether your city is founded on Order or Religion.  You'll spend the rest of the game choosing whether to align yourself with the Pilgrims, Stalwarts, Faithkeepers, or Evolvers.  Every chapter will offer you a choice that results in two very different experiences, so the only way to experience the whole game is to have a go at both.  I've played through both Order "campaigns," and thoroughly enjoyed each of them for different reasons.  And I am absolutely not finished with the game yet.  I'll have a go at Faith next but what I'm really excited about is possible future DLC.  I have no idea what DLC 11 bit studios might have in mind for Frostpunk 2 but I can see a couple of angles they might take the game and honestly the DLC for the original Frostpunk were such an amazing experience that I'm almost more excited to see what the Frostpunk 2 DLC brings than I was for the main game. With the game only freshly released, I assume any DLC will be a long way off yet. While I wait, Frostpunk 2 also comes with an in-built "Utopia" mode - similar to Frostpunk 1's Endless mode but it also includes communities and factions that you'll encounter in-game.

Verdict

I'd very happily recommend Frostpunk 2 to any fans of the original, but with one caveat:  If you're looking for more of the original Frostpunk, just go ahead and fire it up again - there's an Endless mode now that might not have been there if you played in the early days, and the DLC is absolutely superb if you haven't experienced that yet.  If you've never played Frostpunk, the sequel is certainly fine as a standalone game, but I'd recommend going and playing the original first.  Dig your nails into the setting, survive the experience, and then come back to Frostpunk 2 when you're ready to take things to the next level, because that's what the sequel does best. 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1601580/Frostpunk_2/