Frostpunk 2 Preview - Punishingly Detailed and Fun
Sep. 17, 2024Frostpunk 2 Preview – Punishingly Detailed and Fun
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The year is 1887 and the world freezes over, no seriously it does. You are trying to survive with the last vestiges of humanity in the hellscape that it is earth, with the biggest problem of staying warm. Not only will you have to master the cold, but you will have to feed and house your people as well as expand in order to prevent the complete annihilation of the human race on Earth.
The general concept ofFrostpunk 2is to extracting enough oil, steam or coal to keep your people warm though out the ever evolving harsh landscape. The planet warms up and cools down, changing the demand of your fuel to keep your people warm, and there are even Whiteouts that will take you to the brink and you must plan for them by stockpiling fuel or be wiped out.
Beyond fuel though, you must also make sure that people have enough food to eat, and that you have enough materials to make new structures and buildings that can impact the fabric of your society, from generating more resources, to curing sickness, reducing crime, or making people work harder.
Frostpunk 2uses a grid system where you build districts on top of resources, and the more resources that you build upon, the longer you can extract them before you deplete them. This doesn’t make you “mine faster” it simply extends the lifespan of that district, allowing you to extract more resources in the long run.
You can even expand your districts as well, and this allows you to place Buildings on them that further boost their efficiency in some way. For instance you can put a Hothouse on a Food District to increase its food production. On the other hand, a Dust Coal Mine on an Extraction District improves the amount of Coal you extract. Or you can place Watch Towers in Housing Districts to reduce Crime in those areas.
A big part of the strategy of Frostpunk 2 is assessing where resources are on the map, which to utilize first, what to prioritize and how to lay out your city to benefit most from those resources. For instance constructing some districts next to one another makes their Heat demand less, so that you don’t need to consume as much fuel. While some other buildings reduce the Workforce demand when placed next to certain types of districts, freeing up citizens to be useful in other places.
Much like strategy games, this will take you a few attempts to figure out and get right, and you’ll likely mess up a time or two. Frostpunk 2 is a very challenging game, and because the game takes place in real-time you really have to pay attention to what you are doing. However, one of the things that I really appreciate is that when you go to build, or pass laws, or negotiate with factions time pauses so that you can think a bit and then resume. This puts Frostpunk somewhere between real-time and turn-based in terms of speed, and I actually really like that.
Beyond gathering resources though, Frostpunk 2 is full of Factions that will be located within your city. These factions have different aims and goals and some of them are in direct conflict of one another. Keeping these Factions happy can reward you with valuable bonuses, like more people to work, improved resource production and more. However, pissing them off can result in labor disputes that cause the loss of production.
Different actions effect how each Faction views you. You can allow them to pass laws for example, take money from them by force, or promise them concessions, and all will impact your relationship with them in one way or another.
There are also random events that occur through out the game, that can dictate action or inaction. These will have some negative and positive consequence usually no matter which you choose, and they tend to break up the general flow of the game. It kind of reminds me of the old Castles game from Interplay in 1991, if you remember that game, of course I’m sure there is a much newer example, but I’m old and tend to think of older games first.
You can also pass laws in your city after building a City Council that will impact resources and production, sickness, crime, population growth, and more. This allows you to shape your society the way you wish, and to shore up the weaknesses you might have from the harsh weather and landscape you find yourself in.
You will often need votes from one or more Factions to make passing these laws possible, and you can negotiate with them by promising them things in order to secure votes, such as researching certain technology they are interested in or passing another law of their choice of some sort of given timeframe. Of course if you don’t deliver on those promises, that faction will resent you a bit for that, and might favor you less. But if you do deliver, they will like you that much more.
You research new technology at your Research Institute in Frostpunk 2, which you must construct. This is probably the single most important building you will make besides your City Council. This allows you to construct new buildings that will improve your city in some fashion, from reduced heat consumption, less crime, more resource generation, etc. And you will need to research a lot in order to stay alive in the harsh weather.
Often times what you research will be dictated by an agreement that you made with a Faction during a City Council session, and others it is driven by need. It takes time to research, so make sure you are ahead of the game, rather than behind or you will always be in a bad position.
And eventually in Frostpunk 2 you will build a Logistics District that will allow you to send out expeditions onto the world map and uncover new resources, find more people for your city, and even find new fuel sources that could allow you to create new colonies. From this point you will have to manage your main city and colonies at the same time, by sending them citizens for their workforce, or maybe food since they might not have any food resource deposits near them to harvest. They might send you more fuel in exchange, and so your sphere of influence and control expands, but so do your responsibilities, and Frostpunk 2 gets that much more challenging and complex.
Frostpunk 2has both a story mode, which I highly recommend playing first since it teaches you the basics of the game, which might take awhile to fully grasp, it did for me, but the story mode really helped with that. And there is also a Utopia mode, which is sort of like a custom map that you can change certain aspects of to give yourself a “free play” not unlike something you would find in other strategy games where the story is taken out and you just have to survive.
Frostpunk 2 is a purely singleplayer game, there is no multiplayer, and it is a game of endurance, survival and intelligence. I cannot understate that it is a very tough game, and I died quite a lot, but I also could not stop playing. I found myself hours later looking at my phone really wondering if that much time had gone by, and then I thought, “Just one more game”.
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Castielle
Senior Editor at Fextralife. I enjoy gaming, playing and watching sports, cooking yummy food, watching a good movie and hanging out with Fex.
