Punk Glacier 2 It was an ambitious tactic. Once you managed to survive and the excellent and sinister advisor of the introduction whispered evil Tory ideas, the whole city you built in Punk ice cream It is now just the headquarters of a sprawling expansion effort, and its rule is no longer absolute. Rather than retreading the same ground of “preparing for ultra-winter,” its biggest obstacle will likely be its own people, now organized into shifting political parties and looking outward with colonial eyes. The result is a complicated and laborious process. survival A city builder that's two parts engaging and one part frustrating for all the wrong reasons.
It's more political, in a word. His predecessor may have been a monster, but it was undeniable that without him… some If leadership were ruthless, everyone would die horribly. Here that's less certain, so you rely on open negotiation with nascent social groups who vote directly on every law and even propose their own. Every law, every building, every research project draws the “zeitgeist” toward one of six values like Adaptability, Tradition, and Equality, in addition to its practical effects. Factions favor different values, with radical ones also differentiated by their mutually exclusive plans for all the resources you'll suck out of the world.
There are too many ways for you and the factions to interact to list them all, and too few to do anything about the huge problems they're obviously going to cause in the long run. The first few chapters are a piece of cake politically, as you promise everyone easy things they already wanted in exchange for legislation that establishes the society you want. But by the middle of my playthrough, most factions wanted things that would just ruin everything. In particular, they kept trying to repeal the law that halved our fuel consumption, in favor of a completely pointless trickle of building materials when You are literally freezing to death and voting for the heat to go away.idiots.
One faction swaggered out during a snowstorm, against my orders, to bring food when we already had three times as much as we needed. When it finally came time to decide what grand plan to implement, the other faction complained that they were being killed and began sabotaging the buildings that prevented the exact deaths they were protesting.
This was long after the first political protest by the Stalwart faction, which I left alone, thinking it best to let them march and take up places, then offer them some concessions. They murdered 500 people. Then another 500. This continued until I sent in some guards, and the thirty deaths resulting from this, the game told me, had “radicalized” the Stalwarts. Somehow the word on the street was that the people who slaughtered a tenth of the population because I refused to research “Thought Correction Prisons” were normal, sensible guys, and I was a tyrannical jerk for stopping them. What did I start a propaganda network for?
The problem is that by moving from survival to realpolitik, Frostpunk 2 becomes a Management game It’s all about leadership, but it doesn’t give you enough means to actually lead. It’s telling that as soon as the game unlocked the ability to simply round up both radical factions (the hardcore ones were responsible for 85% of our deaths, but the others were trying to turn all women into breeding slaves, children into soldiers, and practicing eugenics on the “weak”), I immediately did so and won the game. Oh sure, one of the survivors might try to assassinate me, but that’s only because the game forced me to put them in isolated “enclave” districts instead of shooting them all, who together were now 1% of the population. Maybe I could have won through the peace deal option, or by building them their own independent colony, but a) screw these psychopaths and b) that sounded like a chore.
While you're taking on factions, you also build (visually similar) districts around the city to gather resources, ideally around hubs that apply bonuses, with expansion buildings attached to customize the districts to a fairly intricate degree. Maybe you turn materials into coal, and coal into oil. Factories might recycle some material, housing might have a guard post, hospital, or prison, the logistics district an expansion that helps your explorers work faster around the map. Many of these allow for special actions that can trigger an event, and don't forget that they can all please a faction and push the zeitgeist somewhere. Oh, and your eastern colony has run out of food and the other's supply is full, and the council voted without you. No, we didn't tell you that or reassign those workers for you. We were too busy pausing the game with indistinguishable audio alerts (but still making you pan around the map to find their source) and pop-up messages that disappear if you hit the space bar which is also pause.
You build colonies, too. Many locations provide resources or immigrants, subplots with multiple resolutions, and occasionally a colony site, which you build from scratch like the city, then keep on top of balancing exports and reserves and potentially ongoing events. Its world map suffers the same fate as post-Frostpunk survival builders like Endzone and New Cycle; parts of it divert attention from settling, and other parts are a reductive, forgettable chore. And all the while, you have interruptions. Some laws had consequences—will you amend them? One man has some (cool) flavor text. The problem you already solved is still solved. The nomads are grateful that you sacrificed a lot of oil, and now they want a big supply of oil that you don’t have because you gave it away. Oh my god, fuck. off.
It's great that there's so much detail that specific combinations of laws can cause unique problems. It means that the mere possibility of unintended consequences makes you wary of things that seem mechanically useful. But it's all too much. I was crying out for someone to delegate to in two chapters, and while I'm curious to see alternate endings and events, the process of building and finding resources and manually adjusting each district When population decline is too exhausting a prospect for a society, I don't have much reason to worry without the motivating threat of annihilation. All that's left is to expand on its own. I don't think that any He has a sustainable plan here and there is no one he likes.
I want to love Frostpunk 2, and I think that’s precisely why so much of this review is negative. It deserves credit for the courage to throw itself into something new rather than playing it safe. It’s far more engaging, interesting, and super atmospheric than its peers, but that ambition has cost it a singular intensity and focus that makes its novel narrative and design too contradictory to take it to the same heights.
This review is based on a review version of the game provided by the publisher.
