Frostpunk 2. Real frost is in the people’s hearts

The Polish developer and publisher 11 bit studios has been around since 2010 and managed to make a name for itself thanks to its extraordinary, beautifully special games and its policy of supporting such projects. The company knows a lot about good gameplay, which also interacts sensitively with human emotions. This is especially evident in 2014’s This War of Mine, which is still one of the most important video games about war.

In Frostpunk (2018), the developers went even further and created a unique combination of a city-builder and survival games, in which people’s survival in the midst of eternal frost is partly prevented by their own depravity. Frostpunk 2 takes this idea and makes it central, bringing it to a fundamentally new level. But if the ideological part of such games doesn’t interest you, you’ll still get an almost standard sequel with more and better stuff. Unless the new scale lacks a little bit of content.

In one of the scenarios of the first part of Frostpunk, the main character, whom everyone calls the Captain, managed to save the city of New London from a terrible ice storm. Since then, 30 years have passed. The Captain died, and the Steward took his place. However, a society that has literally survived the end of the world no longer wants to unite around a single strong leader. The inhabitants of New London are divided into factions, each with their own ideas about the future. The main task of the Governor is to successfully combine the development of a new civilization and satisfy the needs of different factions, which often contradict each other.

City planning strategies are a genre that focuses primarily on the gameplay, and a rather specific one at that. Not everyone wants to understand a bunch of parameters, dependencies, and numbers that make up almost every game of this kind. However, Frostpunk 2 is able to attract even people who come to video games for stories. After all, there is nothing wrong with the direction, plot, and general generation of situations.

The best place to start with Frostpunk 2 is in the story mode, which is divided into several chapters. As it happens from time to time in various video games, Frostpunk 2’s story mode is actually a very well-designed training mode. Each chapter introduces you to a specific stage in the development of a post-apocalyptic state. No one will lead you by the hand, so the story campaign still poses a worthy challenge to the players’ skills. However, the developers don’t leave you to your own devices either, knowing full well that it will be incredibly difficult to deal with the scale of Frostpunk 2 from scratch.

Because Frostpunk 2 is a large and complex game that makes the first part seem like a demo, if not a trial run. Instead of individual buildings, the sequel offers to build entire districts, and as the game progresses, you will have to start from scratch with new colonies and settlements, and then establish connections between all territorial units. Yes, the game still has threats like cold, disease, and hunger. But the overall feeling of the end of the world has become significantly less. People managed to adapt and remembered again how much they love to fight with each other for literally the slightest reason (it reminds us of something…. – ed.).

Politics, social engineering, conflicting philosophies, and psychotypes are what will keep you busy most of the time. Different factions have strikingly different views of the new society. For example, one faction sees salvation in abandoning classical heat sources and establishing many small settlements in different parts of the world. Another will cling as much as possible to the “old world” with its traditions of capitalism and class inequality. The third will resemble technological fanatics for whom mechanisms are almost a religion and people are expendable.

In each main city, you will have to deal with at least three factions at the same time. As the game progresses, this number may change, as well as the number of people within each faction. They will constantly ask the Governor for favors. If you refuse them for a long time, their distrust of you will grow. As a result, you can lose the position of Governor altogether and get a “bad” ending and an early end to the game.

It is the fuss with factions that has become the basis of Frostpunk 2’s gameplay. The needs of the factions are embedded in the technological and political development of the state, and also affect the overall progress of the game. Of course, you can simply choose your favorites and do everything for them, while simultaneously “suppressing” all the claims of other factions. But it is much more interesting to try to balance the needs of different segments of the population. This way you will not only receive bonuses from different factions, but you will also be able to promote laws in the Council more easily.

The Council is another innovation of Frostpunk 2 and a place where you will spend a lot of time. It used to be that the Captain could introduce various rules and laws without taking into account people’s opinions, only facing the consequences of his decisions. The Governor has no such authority, so every law must first be put to a vote among all factions. Each faction has a certain number of representatives in the Council. The larger the number, the more important it will be to sway them to your side during the voting. However, it is also possible to go the other way and do everything possible to destroy the authority of the leading faction in the Rada. Then there will be fewer people from it who can vote.

The further the game goes, the more frequently and impudently the factions will bother the Governor. Sometimes it even seems that they resemble small children who only ask and ask, but are almost never ready to offer anything. There are a lot of politics and related elements in Frostpunk 2. Sometimes you even forget that the first thing you need to do is build a city in the middle of the ice and look for the last remnants of useful resources.

Expeditions, which have become another important part of the gameplay, help with the latter. The governor can send people to explore the area around the main city, because the world has not ceased to exist even after the end of the world, and your group of survivalists is far from the only one. Expeditions provide a pleasant breath of fresh air, especially when the main city grows to such a scale that it no longer resembles the “final outpost of humanity”.

The author of the text got the most pleasure from exploring foreign lands. In addition, they can turn from “strangers” into “yours” if you establish small outposts there to collect resources or full-fledged settlements that need to be managed on the same level as the main city. And some factions also actively encourage expansion, which can also be one of the ways to complete the game.

Yes, Frostpunk 2 is a difficult video game that gets on your nerves, limits your resources, and constantly presents the Governor with new problems. But at the same time, it also gives you a lot of tools to achieve your goals. Someone can take full control of the state with the help of forceful decisions. A softer Governor will try to negotiate with different factions. Particularly cunning players can exile “inconvenient” people to colonies with the worst living conditions so that they die from hard labor. The world of Frostpunk 2 is full of such cruelty, as the value of human life in it is extremely low.

Similar nuances can be seen in the storyline campaign, which in some key moments suggests making important choices. That is, it has a share of replayability. But it’s even more interesting to watch the development of events in the Utopia Designer mode. In this mode, you choose one of the types of the initial location, the conditions for victory, and the starting factions, and then try to lead the state to dominance in the midst of frost. What’s even more interesting is that the conditions and factions can be randomized. In this case, almost every game will give you a new experience.

However, after completing the campaign, you may worry about the quality of the “free” mode, because the plot in Frostpunk 2 is as good as it gets. There is even a place for stylish titles in the spirit of Alan Wake II. However, in this matter, the game is saved by another significant advantage that stretches back to the first part and has become even more attractive in the sequel. We are talking about a variety of random events, thanks to which the game unobtrusively creates unique stories.

For example, you conducted a study that makes mines more useful in terms of resource extraction, but the danger to workers in them has also increased. And then you allowed young children to work in the mines. Then an accident can happen at the mine, and you either have to destroy it and lose the source of resources forever, or you have to blow up the children, but save the coal instead. Every decision you make, every law, is also actively commented on by the city’s residents, and some decisions lead to unique scenes. Returning to the example of children and mines, a mother who lost her son in an incident will try to steal another child for herself.

Yes, not all events are necessarily in strict dependence on each other. Very often you can see that they just coincide nicely from a narrative point of view. However, even with this scenario, 11 bit studios deserves almost maximum praise. After all, not every game is capable of generating such high-quality stories randomly.

Why “almost maximum”? Because closer to the end of each game, it becomes obvious that the number of events and scenes is still a bit too small for the unashamedly gigantic scale of Frostpunk 2. Therefore, you risk seeing the same requests from factions, problems of city residents, conflicts in the Council, and so on. The game itself is even ironic about this fact, because, for example, it has an achievement for bringing back a law that you recently repealed yourself. However, some dependence on repetition still spoils the overall experience of the game.

It seems that 11 bit studios was aware of this potential problem. That’s why the game’s advertising campaign emphasized the ability to make modifications for Frostpunk 2. Right in one of the videos, they showed how the city should fight dinosaurs. So there will definitely be plenty of such madness in the game. The main thing is that the community of mod authors should pay attention to it.

The appearance of tools for modifications became possible due to the change of the game engine. The first Frostpunk was powered by the proprietary Liquid Engine of 11 bit studios itself. The developers did not have the extra money to add the ability to create mods to the engine. But Frostpunk 2 runs on Unreal Engine 5, which is friendly with mods right out of the box.

The transition to Unreal Engine 5 also affected the visuals of the game. Frostpunk 2 looks amazing. Even by the standards of AAA releases, the game has something to impress you. This is especially true for weather effects and lighting. And among the citybuilders, Frostpunk 2 can easily be called the best in terms of visuals. Especially when you start looking at how the city works at the level of details and individual residents.

However, the transition to the new engine was not painless. Sometimes Frostpunk 2 likes to slow down significantly, even if there are no obvious reasons for this. Some complex visual effects such as storms sometimes look strange, as if something breaks during their processing by the engine. At the same time, even during the period when we were writing reviews, 11 bit studios released several updates that significantly affected the game. Therefore, it is highly likely that all problems will be fixed in the future.

Speaking in analogies, Frostpunk 2 is like Batman in relation to the first part: Arkham City in relation to Batman: Arkham Asylum or Assassin’s Creed II in relation to Assassin’s Creed. The new game by 11 bit studios took the ideas of the original source, expanded them several times, and was not afraid to experiment further. As a result, players received a citybuilder in which they can spend tens, even hundreds of hours. A game that generates gameplay and narrative moments that can stay in your memory forever. And which turns even a rather trivial artistic trope “real monsters are people” into something really exciting for the brain.

If the game had only technical problems, it would have easily received an Editor’s Choice and its rightful 9 or 9.5 points. However, it’s the too many repetitions in the finale of each attempt to build an ice empire that prevents us from raising the score higher. After all, creating decent ideological content is much harder than fixing bugs. However, something tells us that with additions and modifications, Frostpunk 2 will overcome this disadvantage as well. So you can cautiously give the game the title of the best citybuilder in advance.

And a few words about the Ukrainian localization. Its very presence in the game from the start is a pleasant surprise, and the vocabulary in Frostpunk 2 is literary and florid. However, at times you can see that the same terms are translated differently. Sometimes there is no word agreement or incorrect cases are used. And in some lines there is no translation at all. In addition, I had to switch the language to Ukrainian manually every time I restarted the game. We hope to chalk up these drawbacks to temporary issues that will be fixed with patches, but we’ve warned you.