Frostpunk 2 review – the greater good --[Reported by Umva mag]

A post-apocalyptic city builder and political simulator may not sound the most exciting prospect, but Frostpunk 2 is one of the most tense and engaging games of the year.

It’s interesting to wonder sometimes, what movie or comic book villains would do if they actually did conquer the world. Once the forces of good are defeated what happens next? Do they start getting into the miniate of tax rates and environmental policies or do they immediately just let everything devolve into anarchy? If there’s one thing the Frostpunk series teaches you, it’s that ruling the world is always a choice between the least worst options and what your intentions are, whether good or evil, don’t really matter – only the end result.

In the lore of Frostpunk, the world has been reduced to a single city, sitting on a glacier above the remains of Great Britain. The unusual post-apocalyptic setting involves an alternative history where the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 was even more severe and kickstarted a new ice age from which humanity almost didn’t survive.

You’re in charge of the last known settlement on Earth but keeping it ticking over requires constant sacrifice and while the situation in this sequel is ostensibly more stable, in that you’re now dealing with a much bigger settlement, that only makes the morality of your decisions even murkier.

2018’s Frostpunk was a fascinating game because not only was it an excellent city builder, it was one with narrative purpose. Often these sorts of games don’t have any story at all but, assuming you’re not a sociopath, Frostpunk made you feel guilty for every decision you made and every innocent person you doomed for the greater good. Frostpunk 2 does the same but at higher organisation level, that affects even more people.

Thanks to the events of the last game, humanity has survived and New London is no longer one fuel shortage away from disaster – just maybe four or five. Although the central concept, of making difficult organisational and political decisions to benefit the majority, remains the gameplay in Frostpunk 2 is significantly different from the original.

Your viewpoint is now much more zoomed out, because you’re dealing with a bigger population, so you can no longer see individuals trudging through the snow or along your city streets. This is for practical reasons, because you’re now dealing with zones of buildings rather than individual edifices, but the visual metaphor is obvious, as your high-level decisions distance you from the people whose lives you are affecting.

There’s still plenty of feedback from the citizenry, as comments are passed up the chain of command towards you, or you hear discussions of the impact you’re making over the tannoy system, but in Frostpunk 2 most of your human contact is in the game’s council chambers. Here your plans depend just as much on winning over the 100 sitting councillors as it does your skill at resource management and sensible research and development priorities.

Again, the game’s making a clear point about how politicians can become distanced from the people they’re meant to be serving, never experiencing the same problems and concerns as they do. But rather than a brave freedom fighter, in Frostpunk 2 you’re the out-of-touch politician telling everyone to eat cake.

The more down-to-earth city building aspects work like any other similar game, as you create zones for housing and industry, as well as fuel and food production. It’s also vital to scout out the icy wilderness and establish new colonies, creating roads and power connections to ferry the population around. Although having to clear off the snow, to find anywhere new to build, is a bit longwinded this is all quietly addictive, as you try and keep things ticking over, while upgrading buildings whenever you can.

Despite the surface similarities to something like Cities: Skylines it’s very hard to classify Frostpunk 2 as a cosy game. Not when so much of your time is spent thinking about which of the many political factions you can afford to ignore and which you need to bribe – either literally or in terms of policies – to get your laws passed. Although often there’s no obvious way to change a faction’s mind and so you face the danger of strikes, civil disorder, or outright conflict if you don’t handle things well.

Although some of the factions’ demands revolve around prioritising one new technology over another, their main focus is usually specific laws that they want to get passed – which are often counterproductive or outright draconian.

The political aspect of the game is nuanced enough that you can promise a faction something and still end up tricking them out of it, especially if it’s a vote for a law they were in favour of, that you later engineer to not go their way. At which point you pat yourself on the back for being good at playing the game… and then realise what that means about the way the real world works.

The question of whether authoritarianism is justified in extreme conditions is one of the series’ key questions and here some factions will happily curtail citizen rights, or avoid helping ordinary people, by pretending there’s no other choice. It’s up to you how much you try to counter this and therein lies much of the game’s message, as you decide how much you’re going to deviate from your plan in order to try (but not necessarily succeed) to do the right thing.

Frostpunk 2’s story mode takes around 12 hours to get through but it’s more an extended tutorial than it is a complex narrative. Instead, the stories are generated organically by your decisions and illustrated by little vignettes showing the human cost of your policies. The main game mode is the sandbox mode, but it is more structured than normal for the genre, since it still has objectives to achieve – such as goals for total population.

Given the setting and the focus of the gameplay you might imagine Frostpunk 2 as a rather grey and uninteresting game to look at, but the visuals are actually very good, with the zoomed out view of your city, on the bleak white backdrop of the land, looking strangely beautiful. There are some interface niggles, where the game could do more to warn you of ongoing problems you haven’t noticed, but overall it’s very restrained and unobtrusive.

Some may be disappointed that Frostpunk 2 feels less personal and more abstract than its predecessor but that’s entirely the point. People are literally reduced to statistics and even as you tell yourself, and the various factions, that you’re making decisions for the good of all, that still involves hundreds or even thousands of people dying – in knowingly dangerous coal mines or because you didn’t stockpile enough fuel to survive an inevitable snowstorm.

Not only is Frostpunk 2 a great game purely in gameplay terms, but it has something important to say about humanity and politics. It doesn’t beat you over the head with the developer’s own viewpoint but by forcing you to make the hard decisions you end up questioning yourself about just how moral a person you really are.

Formats: PC (reviewed), Xbox Series X/S*, and PlayStation 5
Price: £37.99
Publisher: 11 Bit Studios
Developer: 11 Bit Studios
Release Date: 20th September 2024
Age Rating: 18

*Game Pass from day one

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