Frostpunk 2 Review

The land might be covered in a thick layer of ice but New London’s flame still burns thanks to the will of its people and the old Captain’s guidance. With their former leader gone, the hardened citizens look to me to safeguard their future in this brave new world; but I am no longer an all-powerful Captain. As Steward, I not only need to forge a path for the city while listening to the voices of several groups of people but also consider the broader picture.

At the press of a button, mammoth machinery breaks massive chunks of ice, allowing me to expand outward. Instead of single buildings, I choose larger areas of frozen ground to cover entire districts that provide shelter, craft necessary goods, and exploit nearby resources.

Although vital early on, surface deposits don’t last forever. To secure the long-term future, my Frostland teams scout the frozen wilderness for additional resource spots and places to colonize. Meanwhile, at home, the brightest minds vying to have their ideas shape the future propose a multitude of research options such as specialized drills that exploit the vast resource deposits below the earth alongside a plethora of other vital technologies and laws.

Frostpunk 2 operates at a grander scale than its predecessor but retains a lot of the original game’s DNA, offering a challenging and stressful but nonetheless approachable blend of city builder and society survival elements.

Relatively straightforward, the former revolves around planning where to place the aforementioned districts, which come in four main flavors – food, extraction, industrial, and logistics. Each one can be expanded and improved through proper research that enables the use of slots that house special buildings.

Once built, they further improve resource output or the number of available Frostland teams, allow discovering experimental treatments for disease, or provide additional housing space and not-as-cozy prisons for the more radical elements in your society.

Space is limited and resource spots are fixed, so you’ll have to plan your city’s layout to some extent. Place houses next to factories and people will live in squalor even outside of their working hours. As you move further away from the generator, heating hubs become key to more bearable working conditions and battling disease. Various hubs allow you to stockpile more resources, proving vital when spontaneous protests erupt or powerful snowstorms put a sudden halt to most production and exploration efforts.

Even with access to deep resource deposits, you’ll sooner rather than later need to send Frostland teams out into the frozen wilderness. Expansion inevitably involves dealing with and working around (?) limitations. Districts require a workforce provided by the population. Some of your people might become sick and unable to work or you may find yourself struggling to produce enough materials for goods, which, in turn, stunts growth.

Finding outside survivors or enacting laws that open the gates of your city solves the workforce issue but also raises the number of mouths to feed, which is when constructing outposts that provide additional resource streams – even if temporary – acts as an excellent incentive to uncover as much of the old ruins of civilization as you can.

Mechanically, exploration isn’t particularly involved, simply requiring you to zoom out and assign teams to certain territories while ensuring that trails or skyways connect the main city to any outposts and colonies. In the story mode, the latter are smaller settlements that you build up while ensuring adequate conditions and resources for the people you send to work and live there.

They remind me of a lighter take on what recent Anno games do with their multiple settlement approach, as managing colonies provides an extra challenge and temporary break from the factions of your main city.

But no matter how well you prepare, there will come a time when your citizens lack food and heating or have to deal with squalor and disease, which is one set of causes for tensions to rise. Crises inevitably force you to reduce or make do without the workforce in certain buildings – either by transferring it elsewhere or relying entirely on stockpiled resources – while you address the root cause. Such moments come with a fair share of stress, but overcoming them and avoiding violent outbursts from radicalized members of your society always feels rewarding.

Your choice of buildings, research, enacted laws, and direct support or condemnation of specific groups gradually sees the city moving toward certain ideologies; but it also acts as another source of tension. Some factions might respect progress and merit-based actions, while others can look towards tradition and equality as guiding beacons. You can attempt to reconcile everyone but more often than not, leaning into a specific path can prove more efficient.

These clashes play heavily into both the branching narrative choices of the excellent story mode – encouraging replayability – as well as the gameplay of both it and the sandbox-inspired Utopia Builder mode. Furthermore, the inclusion of factions and communities helps better contour the idea of a society that can fight for control of its city in more than just one way.

Picking Officer difficulty – which the developers recommend to veterans of the original – proved more than I could handle during my first playthrough, due, in part, to Frostpunk 2’s lackluster tutorial and initial levels of user interface clarity. Aside from a few helpful pop-up messages, the former revolves entirely around encyclopedia-style pages that lack interactivity but can be perused at your leisure.

The issue of UI clarity was addressed to an extent via a patch deployed during the review period, but it – although uniquely stylish and fitting Frostpunk 2’s icy aesthetics – still took a bit of getting used to afterward.

This is why I switched to Citizen difficulty – the easiest – as it’s perfect for accommodating all the game’s different systems, a good chunk of which you have to deal with right away.

Tackling Officer – the second of four – later helped me avoid being thrown out into the vast snow-covered expanse by an angry mob – which was the unfortunate conclusion of my first attempt –, although I still occasionally found myself pausing the game and struggling to find specific district abilities.

On the easiest difficulty controlling the direction of things, silencing dissenting voices, and ensuring that the council votes the “right” laws is quite easy, especially once you unlock abilities that veer closer to absolute power. This changes significantly on higher difficulties, where the danger of civil war and being deposed is very much real.

Officers and above certainly feel closer to the intended experience, where the need to balance resources and make sacrifices plays a vital role. You’ll have to negotiate with undecided factions to pass laws. This may require you to derail your plans as the communities ask that you focus on different types of research and buildings or risk angering them even further should you break promises.

These decisions then impact the individual citizens and you’ll regularly learn their thoughts through frequent pop-up messages. Opening alcohol shops might lead to widespread alcohol addiction, but it’s hard to argue against the extra income when your eyes are set on expansion.

Similarly, separating families – as heartless a decision as it is – could go a long way to preventing disease from running rampant when you’re struggling to fill the generator with enough coal.

Frostpunk 2 is undoubtedly a compelling experience if one that keeps you more detached from your people than the original did. As the Steward, sometimes things didn’t go my way, as certain groups decided to vote against laws that would benefit the city in the short term. In such instances, I felt less guilt when an event informed me that little Timmy chose a life of crime because little Timmy should have known better and asked his dad to support the apprenticeship initiative I proposed in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, reading through these messages – whose top-notch art direction stands out – still made me occasionally wonder if I’m truly fit to lead these people. But the additional layers between me and the individuals who put their lives in my hands ensured that I felt less horrible about sacrificing thousands of people to toxic fumes than I did when opting to send children to work in the mines during one of the original game’s most challenging portions – a choice that haunts me to this day.

Yet, even with this weaker connection and the lackluster onboarding early on, Frostpunk 2 feels like a natural evolution of the series’ society survival formula. Its story mode alone is hard to put down and warrants multiple playthroughs thanks to the different choices you can make, while the Utopia Builder mode offers a more sandbox-centric approach. In the latter, you set broader goals and work towards them starting in different locations with more or less challenging layouts, different types of resources, and often-randomized surrounding Frostlands.

The repeating narrative events and lack of greater stakes in the Utopia Builder mode do take some wind out of its sails, but it does its job well enough as a solution for anyone who happens to want more of the sequel after seeing the narrative through to its end.

Performance

On an i7-13700K, 32 GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3080@1440p, Frostpunk 2 ran at around 30-40 FPS when attempting to play on Ultra High settings, without DLSS turned on. Dropping down to High settings the framerate hovered around the 40-50 area.

Turning on DLSS using its Quality setting gave me around 10 extra FPS, although getting a stable 60 FPS framerate proved quite challenging, especially as the city expanded.

Although it’s less of a factor, since you spent a good chunk of the game zoomed out, and it didn’t impact my enjoyment too much, it’s worth noting that your mileage may vary (also depending on your exact rig) in terms of launch-day performance.