FROSTPUNK 2 REVIEW GENERATOR
FROSTPUNK 2 REVIEW PLUS

The other layer Frostpunk uses, in addition to intricate city building, is the pull of the unknown. How do you feel about that? You may survive the cold but will be proud about how you did it? Keep it warm, keep it warm! How do you feel about that? Your scouts came across a ravaged group of survivors and instead of helping them, put them out of their misery and took their stuff. A child died because they were exhausted and even though their mother pled you kept them working. Through your decisions, the consequences of which you see played out on the people sagging or prospering under your rule, you city builds a story. It's a fascinating position to be put in, a layer which gives Frostpunk a whole other dimension and a kind of soul. People get hurt but that's the price they pay. It's why you enable a neighbourhood watch and guard towers, enabling guards to be used in various encounters which crop up, such as protests. It's why you pass a law enabling fighting pits to let off Discontent each evening, and why you enable prostitution in public houses. All the time Discontent rises and Hope falls within your city, and if you let them reach their negative extremes, you're done for, turfed out, game over.

FROSTPUNK 2 REVIEW PLUS

What will you do with their corpses? A snow pit seems easiest so you pass the law and build one, plus it gives you the option of recycling their frozen bodies for food later on.īut these decisions do not go unnoticed. People start to fall ill, some gravely, and they die.

FROSTPUNK 2 REVIEW GENERATOR

Fortunately the beacon you built attracts some survivors and you're glad for their extra help, but you're not glad for the extra mouths to feed so you pass a law enabling soup rations to make food stretch further.īy now the warm space around your generator is taken and the tents you need to build for the newcomers are in the cold. But you will need people to work the sawmills and coal thumpers and steel works. Then resource piles begin to disappear and you need engineers to research an alternative, and quickly, so you pass a law enabling 24-hour shifts in the workshop. Then one of your people suggests putting children to work, and in the cruel moment it makes sense and so you pass the law. You still need more of everything but you have no one to get it. Small beginnings, and Christopher Lambert, implausibly - no immortality for him here.īut soon you need these people elsewhere, in cook houses, hunter's lodges and medical tents, and your gathering force thins. Around you lay piles of coal, wood and steel, and you assign groups of people - workers or engineers - to gather them. The temperature is -20 degrees and you need to find coal to keep your generator stoked for warmth, wood to build shelters for your people, and food to feed them. In Frostpunk you're in charge of building the last city on a completely frozen Earth, and you're up against it from the off. As I hung on towards the campaign's end, I genuinely held my breath. It's a heart-pumping scrabble for survival, a thrill I've never felt in a city builder. You think you're safe and then something happens to wrongfoot you, be it a scripted event or the temperature plummeting again.

You never make a decision in the game from a position of comfort - a mixture of dwindling resources and ever worsening cold ensure that. Like developer 11 bit Studio's previous game This War of Mine, this is where Frostpunk exists, on the edge of coping, where you're always put between a rock and a hard place. What drove me there? I didn't suddenly lose my mind I did it because it was better than the alternative. None of us in our right minds would implement these regimes, and yet in Frostpunk I did. How did it come to this? Public executions are being made in the name of a divine ruler. A thrilling but thin survival twist on the city builder genre, oozing dark charisma and political dilemmas.

Frostpunk 2 review