Frostpunk 2 Review: Bigger City, Less Intimate (PS5)
Summary:
3.3
Beaucracy Punk
Frostpunk is a story of those lonely few gathering together to weather the frozen tundra of an apocalyptic winter. By the end of it, you’ve succeeded in eking out a living in the endless cold and have established a colony. Frostpunk 2 dives off from here into full-on city management, making it a very different game.
The intimacy and personal choices have been blown out to the point that it’s far more of a simulation game than it is a role-playing experience. This is, of course, a double edged sword. For a RPG-lover, it’s a bit of a let down. There are choices to be made throughout the storymode, and there are lovingly-rendered images to accompany them, but they’re few and far between. What’s worse is that you hardly feel the weight of your actions, nor do most choices matter in the long run.
Take the first choice for example, to weather the winter you can:
- Continue stockpiling food and risk not meeting quota.
- Slaughter the local population of seals, securing this winter but losing the food source.
- Allow the elders, who have volunteered, to walk out into the snow to never return, reducing the stockpile quota.
By the time I reached this choice, I wasn’t especially concerned. I didn’t know any of the people living in my city, they were just numbers ticking up or down, so I wondered why there wasn’t an option D: Eat the elders. After all, why waste the protein? That would see the food stock number go up and the stock quota go down at the same time. And for a game like Frostpunk, which is basically Mad Max in snow, why not? The only obvious answers seem to be that it’d make the game too easy, or that they do want you to care about your people, even if they don’t want you to meet them.
In the end, I let the elders take a walk. I safely met quota and wondered if I should have tried the kinder path, but the only effect was a title card of a child saying ‘Grandma said I won’t see them for a long time, who will read stories to me now?’. That got me. But only for a moment, then it was back to managing my energy resources and switching between pausing and fast-forwarding my icebreaking.
On the mechanical side of the game, it’s similarly frustrating. You should know that I haven’t got the patience for city-builders, but I don’t mind a game like Civilisation. The difference here is the micromanaging time. There’s no clear reason why the game couldn’t be set up by turns instead of realtime. Maybe others play it differently, but I play it with turns anyway, pausing to set up my actions then fast-forwarding until some complete, repeating ad nauseum. It all feels a bit fiddly, and it’s definitely wasting more time than it needs to.
All in all, it’s a let down, but not a failure. It’s gorgeously rendered, and a direct evolution from the first game, but it’s left some of the grit and grime behind. If you are the type to love a city-builder, then you’ll likely love it more than the first, just know that there are some technical difficulties when your build number gets too high (you can drop your graphics settings to offset this). But if you were hoping for some hard choices and tough scenarios, the first game (plus DLCs) is the better choice.
About the Author
Branden Zavaleta Based in Perth, Branden writes on the arts for a handful of Australian outlets. He's also a street & creative portrait photographer, who's work can be found @brandenzp on Instagram.
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