Frostpunk 2 Re-Review: Hell Frozen Rain

I once saw this movie called Snowpiercer, made by the same director who made the Oscar-winning ‘Parasite‘—Bong Joon-ho. In that movie, the whole world had frozen over by human intervention, plunging the planet to several degrees below zero. And it made me wonder, ‘how the heck would anyone survive out there?’ The question lingered at the back of my mind for days until I came across this game called Frostpunk. Frankly, I was not that much into city-building games but whenever I played one, I would be hooked for hours! The game made me realize my worst communist wet dreams. But who would have thought I would face severe ramifications for my true nature when I practiced the same tactics in the sequel!

Frostpunk 2 is a city-building survival game set in a frozen, post-apocalyptic world in an alternate history of the early 20th century. Developed and published by 11 Bit Studios, Frostpunk 2 was released in September 2024 and earned high accolades including ‘Best Strategy/Sim Game’ at The Game Awards 2024.

But is it really worth the hype? Let’s find out- again!

Let’s break the ice

Frostpunk 2 is set 30 years after the first game. It’s the year 1916, and the Captain of New London, whom we controlled in the first is dying. It doesn’t help that the City is overcrowded and the eternal coal-powered Generator is running out of fuel. The game’s prologue starts when a group of wanderers find the wreckage of an old Dreadnought engine and use its furnace to camp out before a ‘Whiteout’ storm hits them. Once the storm passes, they march on to New London only to find the Captain deceased. So without question, the reigns of the City are now handed over to us, and we assume the role of New London’s new leader— the Steward. Our goal, ‘ The City must survive!’ (and this goes without saying ‘at all cost’ which is what the basic theme of Frostpunk series is all about).

The prologue introduces basic mechanics like frost tiles breaking to build new districts (yes, we can build entire districts now instead of just one building), teaching us about how the proximity of the districts to the Dreadnought’s furnace and to each other helps in mutual sharing of heat, and very soon we realize that Frostpunk 2 is way different than the original—more ambitious, broader, and brutal!

As soon as we are handed the keys to New London, the game shows its full grandeur, laying bare the entire City, a sprawl of pipes and diesel-punk buildings cobbled up together around a steam-fired generator that has attained a mythical status among the residents. I would say we are a knife’s edge close to creating an entire steam-based religion with the Generator as its prime deity, because in Frostpunk 2 we can enact laws, handle thousands of people at the same time, manage food and other resources to keep everyone happy, meet the heating requirements, build institutions, colonize distant lands and what not! Gone are the days when we had to make a dire choice of sending children to mines instead of school so that we have enough fuel to keep the Generator running till the storm passed. Now we just do it like it’s Tuesday!

The tutorial continues in a way even after the prologue as you’re given certain missions to complete and learn the game mechanics in the process. To begin with, as the steward of the City, you’ll now have to juggle between various types of factions. The frigid eternal winter brings people and ideologies together forming certain factions with their own demands and agendas often in contrast to other factions. At first, you won’t feel the heat (pun intended) as you use your ample resources to frostbreak around your Generator and build districts to extract coal, create fabricating materials, harvest crops, store grains, and help people settle. It’s a soft breeze (also pun intended) playing through the first few missions, politically speaking, as you are able to fulfill your promises made to each faction and enact the laws you like to build the society you want without any ramifications. Since you can pause and time, the ADHD and impatient persona in me was able to grasp all the complicated controls, read through all the tutorial texts that explained each option on the overcrowded HUD, and all. But very soon things started getting out of hand.

Every building, every promise, and every legislation affects the ‘zeitgeist’ towards one of six values like Adaptability, Tradition, Equality, etc., with each faction having its own unique zeitgeist based on their ideologies. For example, the loyal and pragmatic Stalwarts (created from the ‘Order’ ending of Frostpunk) believe in technical ingenuity, law, and order, whereas the Pilgrims believe in adaptability and tradition. Those orthodoxical idiots want to forsake the warmth of my almighty Generator and let the cold in so that they and their kids can friggin adapt to it! Not on my watch! Frostpunk 2 is like a dictator’s wet dream and worst nightmare come true simultaneously. You can pass legislation that allows research on dead bodies to discover ways in which frostbite can be cured, but there will be an opposing party who wants to ‘bury their dead’ instead of donating them to the greater cause. You can build schools to teach children math and science so that they may not ransack the streets brandishing knives at each other, and some other faction who wanted the kids to be taught about survivability and contribute to the workforce would be displeased.

That said, you’ll have to negotiate with the opposition in the assembly, making promises to fulfill their agenda if they vote on a law that you want to pass, or against a law proposed by a faction you hate (I am looking at you Pilgrims). Non-fulfillment of their promises will increase the number of dissidents who can in turn radicalize if isolated enough. Your approval will decrease in the coming assemblies and in fact you’ll witness arson and anti-steward rallies when you zoom in any of the residential districts. Radicalized factions can lockdown entire districts severely affecting the flow of resources to central areas and disrupting the very blood of the City until you give them what they want… or mobilize enforcers and automated sentries to round them off and make them feel the fist of ‘democracy’. When the City is always on the brink of epidemic, riot, and starvation, there isn’t really much sense to play in “democracy”. The City will survive, with or without them.

You can check your discourse based on how much tar is in the trust meter at the middle and bottom of the screen. Micromanage everything—from turning the Generator overdrive ON during months of excessive heat demands and turning it OFF just before it reaches catastrophic failure, to forcing workers to work overtime so that the City’s resource demands can be met, and easing production when the death toll reduced the number of active workers that can be used to build new districts. Every district construction, upgrade, and research Idea takes time to complete, something which you are a master of in the game as you can fast forward time to 2x speed seeing months blink past in a haze… until some crucial notification pops up from one of the district bringing the time acceleration to a pause. Most often these are tidbits of crisis faced by the citizens, based on which you’ll have to decide your next step. You’ll barely get breathing room as notifications—a fire here, a death there, some robot sentries destroying someone’s shop to catch a candy thief—pop up from every corner of New London every few times accelerated week. But hey, at least you get to baptize citizens in oil if you support the Faithkeepers faction!

With time you can visit the old Dreadnought from the prologue and reestablish a settlement there, as well as explore beyond the borders to uncharted terrain in search of more resources, plunder abandoned settlements, and excavate the ultra rare Steam Cores essential for major upgrades. However, it’s like adding more grenades to the ones you’re already juggling as you are stretched thin meeting the heating, fuel, food and manpower demands of every individual settlement by sending resources to and pro when there is surplus. Based on the number of expedition members you have in your Logistics district, you can connect each individual settlement in the over-world via trails and skylines. However, the real dilemma comes in deciding which faction should ascend to power in these colonized settlements.

You see, Frostpunk 2 is far from a social power fantasy; you don’t select an option and a faction gains power. They gain their footing through your thoughtless decisions as you try to focus on the ‘now’ rather than the missions you’ll be getting in the final chapters. For example, there was this distant abandoned settlement called Winterhome and through my actions it seemed that the Stalwarts should be in charge there. However, the pesky Pilgrims started sabotaging it demanding they should be the one in charge, and soon enough they were crying for my blood. As the Winterhome fell into complete disarray thanks to the severe toxic gas explosions and rising death tolls, I was eventually kicked out of office and left to freeze in the snow. That’s how my first playthrough ended. Sometimes I feel like writing a heartfelt and brutally honest letter addressing every single of the faction who hated me and each other, because I ended up hating everyone equally. I hope the City falls and they all die to the eternal winter!

That said you can start over anytime. In addition to the main campaign, there’s an Utopia Builder sandbox mode with seven different starting locations and several modifiers to make each playthrough unique. Convert that coal into oil, construct that guard post in the housing district, establish prison camps next to schools for obvious reasons—you’re free to explore

The Downsides

Despite all my praises of Frostpunk 2, it’s not without its flaws. The game does a poor job of explaining the various options and weeks would pass in the game till you’ve a decent grip on the reigns. You’re left on your own to experiment with each option and infer information from the tooltips.

The second drawback has nothing to do with any mechanics but with the theme of the game itself. You see, where Frostpunk was a true city builder, Frostpunk 2 is more like a ‘society survival sim’. As you manage thousands of faceless and nameless human beings, the emotional aspect we had in the first game kinda misses the mark in the sequel. True the countless notifications add tidbits of the lore of the citizens and we can zoom in to see tiny figures scuttling about, but it all feels so artificial; even at normal time speed, it feels like I’m watching a timelapse video of a city. Didn’t feel like I was peering into a living, breathing place.

Graphics, Performance and Sound

New London is gorgeous to look at! Busy road lines, electrified power-lines, and fume-belching factories, all on a miniature scale contrasted against a white snowy background filled with trenches and gorges.

And the music that swells as the Whiteout falls upon…you’ll feel the chill in your veins to resort to desperate measures to make sure the City makes it through. However, the music in Frostpunk was somewhat better than the sequel maybe due to its attached emotional aspect. Moreover, apart from the music that plays during the Whiteouts, there’s barely any background score and you’ll be listening to the bustle of the city most of the time.

As for the performance, it ran with good fps on my Ryzen 7600x and RTX 3070Ti, maybe because the only particle effects were snow and all the structures were low poly models.

Real Talk

Frostpunk 2 is like a tiny snowball rolling down the side of a mountain and eventually becoming an avalanche, even the smallest choices can have major consequences. And that’s why it’s such a great society-builder game. The game is guaranteed to keep you engrossed for hours on end because the game mechanics will barely give you time to turn around and look at your room’s clock. There’s a reason Frostpunk 2 won the ‘Best Strategy/Sim Game’ at TGA 2024. If you want to enhance your management skills, give this game a try!

FINAL RATING: 70/100