Frostpunk 2

Did you know that the lowest ever recorded temperature in the UK was -27.2°C in Scotland? Not only is that lower than the temperature of an average domestic freezer, but it’s also on the lower end of what you can expect from the world of Frostpunk 2 – the sequel to the incredible city-building sim from 2018 that pits you against the harshest of enemies: a new Ice Age.

Set after the events of the first game, you are tasked with rebuilding your settlement of travellers around a previously lost furnace. Expect the standard city-sim fare here, with resource management at its core and demanding you keep up with the needs of your people, whether that would be food or fuel. Immediately, fans of the original will notice a drastic shift in the gameplay paradigm, with your settlement no longer being built around a singular central structure but instead splayed out across various districts.

The use of districts instead of singular buildings adds slightly more scale to the way the game progresses, making it less of a story about the struggle of a few survivors but instead about the mass plight of a whole civilisation. Your districts are relatively self-sufficient, with the extraction and processing of each resource being handled within the districts themselves instead of building by building, cutting out much of the needless busywork that often plagues the genre. That isn’t to say you can sit idly by as fuel refines itself, but instead displays in full the broader approach to management this game seeks to employ, putting your resources at the forefront.

One of your most valuable resources is by far the public opinion – even though it may be incorporeal, there is significant weight placed on how your citizens perceive your leadership, with tough decisions at every corner – this has always been the standard loop that Frostpunk employs, but the stakes are ever growing with the exponential growth of your settlement. How you choose to manage and withhold resources, run certain facilities and even the policies you enact can have deep impacts on the survivability of your band of wanderers.

Although this shift in style is significant in terms of story, it also poses a problem for fans of the original hoping for a similar, expanded experience. Despite surface similarities, the change from a circular to a hex-based grid is certainly one of the most jarring – in context it marks a shift from New London’s focus on structure and discipline to a model of survival for the masses, but it ends up feeling like a completely different style of game in doing so. For some this might be a welcome shift, but it can be disappointing for those wanting the series to keep its roots firmly planted by the furnace.

The gameplay changes aren’t necessarily bad in their differences, but it can take some getting used to – luckily the game also features an incredible visual upgrade to the original, allowing players to appreciate the new scale with vigour – paired with a perfect orchestral score that has toppled Honkai Star Rail for best opening screen music. What Frostpunk 2 loses in substance, it more than makes up for in style.

Thankfully I didn’t encounter much in the way of game-breaking or otherwise difficult bugs, but at the time of writing there are a number of issues, particularly with the tutorial and some issues with visual accessibility; first and foremost is the UI scaling that’s available in the game – despite increasing the scale of the broader UI elements, on-screen text varies in quality – objectives seem to scale accurately, but the tooltips, story dialogues and tutorial boxes all appear to retain the thread-thin font that is unreadable at any distance. Hopefully this will easily be corrected with a future patch (and perhaps has already been fixed at the time of publication), but it presents a major concern.

The tutorial itself was informative if not stilted in places, giving very little information about how to effectively use some elements. This, combined with a visual issue that caused a translucent overlay to remain on-screen when a display disappeared, made it painful trying to navigate the earlier stretches of the game. Using a trial-and-error approach, I was able to work out the wider systems without too much trouble – thankfully the game isn’t too difficult to learn, but it pays to take your time when playing through the tutorial to make sure you understand everything. The rest of the game won’t be nearly as forgiving.

The more unwieldy aspects of the game are hampered by a fairly unfriendly UI, a noticeable downgrade from the original, whose integrated overlays, full-screen menus and larger information panels made navigating the city a breeze. The new radial menus are a good reflection of the original console versions, but their small size and weird layout don’t lend themselves to an easily accessible game; combine all of this with gamepad controls that feel weighty and unnecessarily complex for a city sim, and it becomes very difficult to recommend anything but keyboard and mouse at this stage.

The flaws in Frostpunk 2 are glaring, but this isn’t to say the game is terrible. With some time and a fair amount of tweaking, this sequel could easily live up to the promises of its predecessor – the new systems present their own challenges, and it may be that the game would have been better named as its own title, but regardless of this, there is plenty of fun to be had in digging a new civilisation out of the snow.