What does it take to survive the end of the world? Not as an individual but as a community, a melting pot of ideals, needs, and wants. Frostpunk 2 puts this question front and centre and asks you to balance those scales. It tasks you with leading one of the last cities on earth after a global ice age hits. It’s part city builder, part narrative game, and part interactive trolley problem.
Playing Frostpunk 2 is like caring for a house plant. You can devote all your love and attention to making sure it has enough sunlight and the right soil – and it still might up and die on you. Or maybe the plant decides it wants to seize the means of production and tells you it needs MORE food, light, and attention. Then, the plant starts a riot and convinces all the other plants to overthrow you. Okay, this analogy might be getting a bit stretched.
You’re consistently asked to make hard choices, often against the desires of your citizens, to ensure the city as a whole survives the next blizzard. This might mean calling for double shifts, halving rations, or sending a small group to work in a dangerous mine to collect materials.
The game hardens you to the idea that it’s often impossible to make everyone happy. Still, it’s that balance between thinking and feeling, which makes it so compelling.
The Last City
In Frostpunk, another ice age has hit the earth, and the few surviving colonies of humans gather together to found cities such as New London. The world has progressed in Frostpunk 2; some cities from the first game still survive, while others are ruined husks.
For those of you who played the original, you’ll remember a relatively traditional city-builder focused around the generator that provided heat to your people.
In contrast, Frostpunk 2 zooms out, both literally and figuratively. You won’t be placing individual buildings, but instead, you’ll designate districts on a hex grid, and buildings will automatically populate that area. It’s a far more detached approach than the original game – more of a city planner than a city builder – but it gives the feeling of guiding a city and watching it grow, rather than building every little piece.
At times, the UI threw me for a loop. The extent of bars, graphs, and information could get overwhelming. The tutorials do an okay job of explaining everything, but you’ll have to do some reading to stay on top.
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The City Must Not Fall
The most obvious change you’ll spot right away is that the cities in Frostpunk 2 are far larger than they were in the original and significantly more varied. Over the campaign, you’ll create cities that build up over two sides of a vast chasm, or deep in a ravine and along the side. These cities grow far more organically than the perfectly circular cities of Frostpunk, and the game feels far more flexible for it.
As your city grows, you’ll be in a constant tug-of-war with the needs of your citizens and the city at large. For example, if you need more housing, you might expand outwards from your city centre, but houses built further out are significantly colder and require more resources to heat. You could instead choose to increase your housing vertically, with taller buildings closer to the centre, but doing so will increase squalor in the city, and make folks unhappy.
Almost every decision you make will have positives and negatives, as well as an impact on how the different factions view your leadership.
The Perils of Human Nature
The way you manage your people has also zoomed out in Frostpunk 2. In the original game, you made decisions and passed laws as needed to keep your city happy. However, 30 in-game years later, the people have decided on a democracy rather than an autocracy, so you’ll find yourself currying favour with several political groups as you try to manage your people.
The primary groups being the New Londoners, who founded the city and prioritise community and group safety above all else, and The Wanderers, who came in over the snow and are more nomadic and less dependent on the city for survival.
You also have the more zealous groups the Evolvers and the Faithkeepers. The Faithkeepers believe in the old captain and the generator as heralds that will protect the people from the cold as the world becomes more harsh. They conduct sermons and baptisms in the oil of the generator and believe the warmth it gives off is the way to survive the winter. In contrast, the Evolvers believe that cold weather is a challenge to be embraced and that humankind must adapt to survive. They favour decisions that put the people first and a ‘survival of the fittest’ mentality.
Playing on custom maps you’ll come across other factions as well, each with their own challenges to your rule.
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Frostpunk 2 does an incredible job of constantly reminding you that you’re managing peoples lives, not just a bar chart of needs. You’re consistently presented with little stories of your townsfolk, that reflect how they feel about your decisions.
One such piece was the story of a grandmother contemplating leaving the city and walking into the blizzard, so that her family had more food. I had to make that decision for her, and the other community elders wrestling with the same choice. I was in a tight spot with my food stores and we were stocking up for the next blizzard… So I sent them to their deaths. I did what was best for the survival of the city, but that didn’t make it any easier to read the sad note from one of the grandchildren, hoping their Gran was in a better place!
These moral quandaries and human stories are at the heart of Frostpunk 2, and as your city evolves, you’ll naturally drift towards one ideology or another. Because while survival is paramount in the post-apocalypse, how you survive is the real challenge.
Survival of the Fittest
The systems of Frostpunk 2 lean heavily into the reality of passing laws in a democracy, which is where the differing factions really come into their own.
Say you want to pass a law that means townsfolk will forage for food as part of their work, and use anything they find to increase food supplies. That would be a great way to reduce the food needs of your city. The Evolvers faction would be all for the law because it makes your survivors more self-reliant. However, the Faithkeepers would be against it, as they believe that the city should provide for those living there.
When you go to pass a law, you’ll see which of the four factions is in agreement with the proposal, which are against it, and which factions are still unsure. Some groups will be outright against the laws that go against their ideologies, but those that are on the fence can be swayed.
If you really wanted to pass that foraging law, and the New Londoners were unsure, you could sway them to your side by promising to pass another law, construct a building, or research something that helps their faction. You can even give them the ability to dictate the next law being passed sight unseen!
This constant push and pull can be really captivating as you see the needs and desires of your city beyond just meters on the home screen. Over time, you get a sense of how the city is evolving, and balancing the various factions can be quite a challenge.
The campaign pushes you to pick sides as the factions inevitably come to a head; you’ll have the choice to put your weight behind one or another. You could also choose the much harder option of making peace, or even declare your ultimate power and oust all others.
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The Great White North
Something that has been significantly overhauled since Frostpunk is how your city interacts with the world around you. When you zoom out, you’ll hit a world map, where you can send off expeditions to explore chunks of the map around your city. In these hidden zones, you’ll find points of interest and often choices that could help your city or offend your neighbours.
You might find a disused tanker filled with oil, perfect for keeping your generator humming. But it seems the people who left it here used it as a burial site to honour their dead. So, taking the oil means disturbing the graves. But what does the comfort of the dead matter when the living are freezing?
You may also find a wandering group of settlers looking for a home. You could take them in, but they might belong to any one of the factions within your city, so you’d be inadvertently giving power to one of your rivals in the government.
Before long, as part of the campaign, you’ll have secondary and tertiary bases that you can build up to support your main city. These also require fuel, food, and people, but they often have access to specific resources that you can harvest and send back to the central city. However, environmental effects such as drops in temperature or noxious gasses from underground can severely impact people there, so you’ll be juggling multiple cities that all need attention.
The campaign is relatively short, my first play-through took me about 8 hours, but there’s replay-ability there. I’m keen to get back in and see what choices I can make differently. There’s also Utopia Mode, which is a selection of maps with some randomised elements, so you can play for longer objectives. Whether this is enough content is up to the player, but it seemed fine if a little short to me. The original Frostpunk received several updates and DLC, so I’m hoping the plan here is the same.
There are also modding tools baked into the new game, so it’ll be exciting to see what the community comes up with.
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Should I Buy Frostpunk 2?
Playing Frostpunk 2 is an exercise in keeping as many plates spinning as you possibly can, but every now and then one of those plates decides you aren’t doing a good enough job and tries to dethrone you.
My time with the game has been a great experience, the team at 11bit Studios have taken the groundbreaking Frostpunk and tweaked and refined it into something new. Almost every piece of the game has changed for the better. While some diehard fans might miss the tighter experience, there’s no doubt that this is a sequel that changes the landscape of the Frostpunk series. And I’m here for it.
Frostpunk 2 is out now for those who have purchased the deluxe edition on Steam. The standard version of the game will release on the 21st of September.
Quest Daily scores Frostpunk 2:
9/10
A copy of Frostpunk 2 was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this review.
