Thirty years have passed since the end of the first Frostpunk and the Captain is dead. In his waning years the city of New London has slowly slipped from a stalwart bastion of humanity to an overpopulated frozen tomb on the brink of collapse, and it’s up to our new player character, the Steward, to fix it. Welcome to Frostpunk 2, the city must not fall.
If someone had to describe the difference between Frostpunk and Frostpunk 2 in one word, that word would be “scale.” Gone are the days in the world of Frostpunk where you meticulously place every individual building, build every road, and worry about whether homes or hospitals should be closer to the generator to reduce their chances of freezing to death. Instead expanding the city means building whole districts that come with their own steam hubs, meaning you are building dozens of buildings at once with their own built-in heat sources that can exist anywhere in your settlement. Heat also becomes easier to manage as you don’t need to worry about the heat levels of the generator or proximity to it, only that you have enough resources to meet the demands, which are determined and consumed automatically without excess. This takes one of the biggest burdens from the first game away, as you don’t need to be constantly shuffling switches on the generator to make sure it’s running correctly, which gives you free time to worry about everything else instead.
If you know anything from Frostpunk 2 you’ll already know all of this, but experiencing it yourself can take a little while to get your head around if you’re used to the first game where getting fifty to eighty new citizens was a big deal. Now suddenly you’re dealing in the hundreds if not thousands of new people at a time, who either want to move to New London or will just naturally be added to your population as the tens of thousands of people that live there already keep reproducing. Similarly the timescale of the game is now weeks and days rather than days and hours, so resources (and their absence) have to be built up with that in mind as well. I was mostly on top of embracing all of that until hundreds of people started dying at a time from my emergency shifts and no one seemed to care, but we’ll get to that later.
While the districts may be larger in scope and the heat may be easier to manage, the biggest and most advertised change in Frostpunk 2 is the system of governance. With the Captain dead his iron grip on passing whatever laws he wanted died with him, so now the various factions in the city get to vote on new laws that the Steward comes up with. This is done through the Council Hall, where 100 people made up of the multiple factions in your city vote on new laws. The factions start as a generalized group of three with certain leanings and political goals but as the game progresses new factions rise up that are extremists that either agree with your agenda and want to push it further or hate your agenda and will begin causing trouble until you roll back your policies or placate them in some other way. For example, you may have Workers, Frostlanders, and Machinists as your starting factions who favor equality, adaptation, and technological leaps, respectively. Lean heavily into equality and adaptation and a group of Workers and Frostlanders might merge to form the Boehemians, but too much equality and adaption and a group of Workers and Machinists might form the Overseers. The Overseers will start pushing more conservative policies and ask for repeals of existing laws while the Boehemians will encourage even more extreme versions of those same laws, and your job is to decide whether to fully embrace one side or try to play politics and keep everyone happy as you move through the game.
Initially I thought this system was a lot of fun. Democracy over dictatorship leads to a lot of tense votes and backroom deals, making every law feel more impactful when you actually do get it passed. Sure, the Overseers don’t want to vote for something like equal pay, but if you tell them you’ll invest in research for a new kind of coal harvester they’ll go along with it. The Frostlanders may not be too excited about deep ice drilling but you can promise to hold a vote on extra support for scout teams and they’ll push you to fifty-one votes. It feels especially good when you promise to do something you were planning to do anyway, like you’re cheating with giving someone a present that you know you’ll get more use out of it than they will. The problem comes from how easy it can be to game the system, as during downtime periods where you have nothing too pressing to vote on you can just manipulate everyone to love you with empty promises. Sure, Overseers, during the next council session YOU can choose what to vote for if you give me more support. It won’t pass because half the Council hates you, but we can certainly vote for it and you don’t need to know how poorly it’ll go. Oh what’s that, you’re holding a public rally for me AND giving me more money? Well let’s keep the train going, you can run another vote NEXT session too! Surely this one will pass… what’s that? More resources because I’m supporting you so well? If you insist…
One might say this is just how political games are played, and to be fair the game does take a while to get to the point where you can manipulate people like this, but it rarely feels like you’re as in danger of losing the city as you were in the first game. Part of this may be because of the people’s faith in you now being represented with “trust” and “tension” rather than the hope and discontent from the original Frostpunk, and as long as people aren’t dying in the thousands or rioting in the streets neither of those are very hard to maintain either. Even the riots aren’t the end of the world, as you just need to make them an empty promise and they’ll calm down rather quickly. There is an interesting game of extremes to be played here though, as there is also a “rule” tab in the laws section that lets you swing the political system closer and closer back to dictatorship, with you as the new Captain. Allegedly the Council only approves these sorts of laws in periods of high tension, so there’s the other side of the political game where you could intentionally let things get bad so you can have more personal power. But in my experience enough greased palms can get you there without the city on fire, and there’s little reason to be the Captain if things are going your way, so it’s not a great idea to rock the boat too hard in case empty political bribes for some reason don’t properly placate Council crybabies.
Another expanded feature is the frostland itself, as you can now build settlements and establish fast delivery systems between them to quickly move resources, harvests, and citizens between each location. Some of these actually can become full-blown cities in their own right with generators, housing, and their own resource gathering nodes, but the game’s choice of what deserves one of these expansions and what doesn’t seems very arbitrary. One could argue that it’s only for locations that are predetermined to have a large variety of resources, but in the campaign there’s a location that is just for oil. One could argue it’s for simplicity’s sake, and while that’s valid suggestion the game provides you with paths to take where you don’t need to build up settlements if you don’t want to, so with both of these factors in mind it just feels like a half measure to save time on art assets and technical limitations. The game does have some UI issues that you’d have to experience to clearly understand, but for settlements specifically it can be very clunky swapping between them, the overworld, and from there to other cities. Making there be more than three cities would no doubt exacerbate these problems, but bad UI isn’t a great excuse either.
Most of what I’ve talked about is actually part of the game’s alternate “Utopia mode,” where you can choose the map, factions, and objectives for your runs. The game does have its own campaign which I’ve alluded to a few times now, acting as a direct sequel to the first game with the Steward picking up the pieces left behind by the Captain (who was probably murdered but the game never addresses it). The reason I’m more interested in talking about the Utopia mode is that it feels the most like what Frostpunk 2 is building towards rather than the campaign itself, to such a degree the game even tells you to do the campaign first. The main issue with the campaign is that it’s far more scripted than the first game, with specific chapters that are designed to begin or end a certain way regardless of your choices. Since this is based on the whims of the game, albeit with some player influence, you’ll have consistent relationship debuffs and even if every social group loves you the game will still throw certain events at you throughout the game to artificially create tension.
Frostpunk 2 is obviously not the first game to do something like this, but it’s a shame that there’s no way to circumvent the worst curve balls the game’s plot throws at you by just being good at your job. Some would say there’s no pleasing everyone, and while that’s true the circumstances of everyone distrusting you or everyone (directly from the game) “revering” you should net you some differences in the scale of the social issues you encounter. This is different from the first game, of course, where the storm was coming whether you wanted it to or not. Hope, discontent, resources? None of it mattered, you can’t tell the weather to go away. People though? Even without being the Captain you can lock up dissenters, bribe officials, win approval. People can be influenced, that’s essentially the whole point of the game, but Frostpunk 2‘s campaign doesn’t reward you for doing that.
On that note the game does try to be a little more people focused, despite its scale. With your city going through years of progress rather than weeks you’ll have occasional cut-in stories that show recurring characters being influenced by your choices, and with the ability to both change and repeal laws your citizens can respond to that as well. Street urchins become students or laborers, men become penniless alcoholics if you open alcohol shops and then don’t immediately close them, etc. Citizens approach you confused if you pass conflicting laws about families, child labor, or personal responsibility and it’s your choice to either clarify the law or let chaos reign. It in many ways does feel like a much more “alive” city than the people you fed soup to every day of the year were in Frostpunk, but along with that comes a lack of… weight.
Frostpunk is probably a game best known for the jokes about the game’s opening choices. Do you immediately introduce child labor? Do you feed people soup every day or lace the food with sawdust to make rations last longer? How quickly do you rush to a brutal dictatorship to put down dissent? All of these were impactful and occasionally shocking choices on the road to The City Must Survive, but Frostpunk 2‘s painful choices come more from the aftershocks of your decisions and late game options than those made in the moment. Tell the children to help in the mines and later they might be in danger. Encourage merit-based pay and suddenly those less skilled start rioting. These are all the consequences of your actions coming to get you, but they aren’t things you yourself are doing so there aren’t the same “what have I become” moments like Frostpunk hit you with while you were trying to survive.
You don’t get to the really wild stuff (unregulated drug use, the death penalty, etc) until you get a faction to a high enough approval level for them to think they can get away with it. On top of that you have to unlock everything leading up to it in the research tree, AND you have to vote on it, AND everyone outside of that faction will get pissed off when you do it. It’s just not worth it in the grand scheme of things, especially when you consider that the original games most extreme laws were to help suppress dissent rather than triggering it. On top of that many players in the campaign probably won’t get to the “we built this city around entirely one ideal” cornerstone laws where you max out a trait like adaption and then get a super ability which is, of course, the worst traits of a society built around that ideal. So in the end you have a campaign mode where the choices are less interesting, the choices matter less for the story beats, and your actions in general are discounted or undermined for the sake of the narrative. There’s also less variety, as the number of available factions seem to be reduced in the campaign compared to the Utopia mode, which again makes Utopia a more in-depth and engaging experience.
At least the presentation doesn’t disappoint as the music, the windswept ice plains, and the art direction are all top notch, especially in a game that’s under 20 GB. Districts of the same categories look similar to each other but are almost never identical and adapt to the terrain you’re building on, so you can build districts up the sides of cliffs or in canyons and they’ll build up in unique ways compared to their flatter counterparts. There’s less of an ability to follow individual people around on the map any more (as days pass in seconds most “traffic” is just blurs of lights) but trains and automatons can be seen moving through rails and streets as the city expands its pathing to meet how you choose to make it grow. And the whiteouts? The storm that ended the first Frostpunk is something you can experience again but actually move past in Frostpunk 2, and the visual experience if that is absolutely incredible. What I’m getting at is that even if the gameplay doesn’t always deliver the same “we’re living on a knife’s edge” atmosphere, the aesthetic is still what you would expect if you’ve played or seen anything from Frostpunk. In some ways that in itself is worth experiencing.
In other ways though I’m a little on the fence. Frostpunk 2 is, thematically, a worthy successor to the original game. After the early tension in setting up a city (be it in the campaign or Utopia mode) the rest of the game becomes more about managing people than managing your own survival, and that makes a lot of sense on paper. The worst years of humanity’s crucible in the frost are behind them and now they just need to learn how to make the most of it, but I feel like something is lost from the original game when you worry more about a city liking you than forcing them to survive whether they want to or not. Many sequels ruin themselves by trying to simplify themselves or being too similar to the original, but Frostpunk 2 seems like it is less interested in what made Frostpunk so compelling and instead wants you to worry about Dave from the Overseers sneaking a slavery law onto the docket next session. Maybe this is a me problem and I should crank the game’s difficulty up to feel the frost nipping at my heels, but with the campaign scripted to undermine you and the regular mechanics so easily abused with false promises, it doesn’t feel as gripping, personal, or easy to fail as the original. It does feel great to get a network of cities running and maybe that’s enough, but for me I’m hoping mods and later DLC make the game worth revisiting.
