Frostpunk 2 Review

Not to sound like a boomer or anything, but I swear almost everything I used to enjoy as a kid has gotten too big for its own good. Call of Duty, for example, is a franchise that’s long since become too big for its own good, and at least as of last year, is way too bloated to be actually enjoyable. Bags of crisps, too, are too big for their own good because now they’re filled with way too much literal air. I could go on and on, but seeing as nobody wants to read a rant about why I think American cars or domestic beer bottle sizes or mainstream movie franchises are too big for their own good, I’ll get straight to the point. Frostpunk 2, the highly anticipated sequel to 2018’s best “try to survive a hostile world without turning into a dictator” simulator is too big for its own good. It’s still a fantastic title in its own right, and a remarkably solid civilization builder, however it lacks the small scale and consequently the human narrative of its predecessor, and therefore is the latest embodiment of the half-winded tangent you just read.

If you haven’t played that predecessor, well firstly you really should go do that, and secondly, allow me to summarise it and at the same time summarise Frostpunk 2. In both games, you take control of a society that’s trying to eke out a living in the wake of a disaster that turned the entire world into what is essentially Antarctica, except everyone has a British accent and very 1800s-looking hats. If you want to stay in power, you, as the leader of New London, need to scavenge resources by way of building mines and the like, while also managing your settlement’s politics, policies and population. That’s never an easy task, with the world around you being literally frozen solid. To outlast the perpetual winter, you’ll have to make a lot of difficult decisions that may kill off what passes for an oasis in the end of the world, or may result in you getting booted out of power.

The main difference between the two titles, however, is scale. Whereas Frostpunk involved carving out a 500ish person colony from a hostile planet, Frostpunk 2 starts you out with a pre-built city with thousands of very cold residents. You still need to find fuel for the generator that keeps all of those residents from turning into icicles, feed them, house them, and establish some sort of order, but there’s a heavy emphasis put on turning your home into a proper civilization. And that’s not inherently a bad thing; Frostpunk 2 has a lot of solid mechanics to make doing so enjoyable. Scouting out the frozen wastelands that exist beyond the limits of New London, establishing outposts in places with resources you can’t find within your own borders and managing your government by way of playing politics with multiple competing factions is engaging and about as much fun as can be given the depressing motif of the title.

Playing politics, then, is Frostpunk 2’s strong suit. As quasi-dictator of New London, you propose policies that affect everything from what fuel source your civilization will use to how children are raised. It’s “amusing” to turn your political party into de facto fascists who use eugenics to ensure a good supply of workers just like it is in, say, Rimworld, or to develop an actual utopia where everyone can live as happily as can be given the circumstances of the game’s world. You need to negotiate with all of the other political parties in New London to do either, which amounts to doing them favours while also attempting to screw them however possible, and there’s a surprising amount of depth to the in-game system as well as how you use or abuse it. Or, to put that another way, it’s like playing Civilization, just with Gandhi threatening to hold a worker’s strike instead of nuking you.

And just to be clear, all of Frostpunk 2’s other systems are great from a gameplay perspective, too. The title is difficult in its easiest moments, and seemingly impossible the rest of the time. New London’s residents will die, you will almost get kicked out of power, and you will have to repeatedly reload from a previous save when you inevitably screw up. Figuring out how to survive and exploit the frostlands takes skill and time, but it’s always rewarding to do so. Finally defining what type of leader you will be, and building a city that can effectively function on its own, regardless of how many errors you make along the way, is superbly satisfying and exponentially more gratifying than it is in games where the survival of your civilization is effectively a given. 

But getting back to the whole “too big for its own good” thing, the problem with establishing a civilization instead of a simple city is that doing so means Frostpunk 2 lacks a lot of the character of its predecessor. Although there are still occasional dialogue pop-ups from your citizens telling you how good (or, as is often the case, bad) you’re doing as a ruler, its narrative just isn’t as human as Frostpunk, or 11 bit studio’s other fantastic title. Although there is still a narrative, albeit a pretty loose one, it’s simultaneously not hopeful and not depressing enough for a game set in the end times. It also quickly falls by the wayside, because, again, Frostpunk 2 rarely gives you time to participate in it. You always need to manage something, and so it's nigh-impossible to focus on the small things, like the individual deaths of New London’s residents or the consequences of any one of your numerous actions. There are simply too many things you need to take care of in the title, so it’s simply not possible to care about most of them in any real way like you can in smaller scale strategy games.

That doesn’t make Frostpunk 2 a bad game, mind, and if anything it’s a remarkably solid civilization builder. Its gameplay is intentionally difficult, but rarely unfair, and there’s always something to keep you occupied yet none of it seems like mindless time-killing filler. It’s not exactly fun to enact policies that would probably put you in The Hague if The Hague existed in the post-apocalyptic United Kingdom, but it is fun to see how those policies play out, and the same is true for most of the actions you take in a general sense. Yet the title as a whole suffers from the same problem that a lot of sequels to beloved games do: it changes so much, yet so little, about what made the first game great that it’s hard not to miss its predecessor’s simplicity.