Frostpunk 2 Review
Most sequels to successful games are safe, conservative iterations on the ideas of the original, but not here: Frostpunk 2 is a bold follow-up that takes an almost entirely different approach to its city-building strategy. It’s set in the same bleak, iced-over world where people struggle to survive, but it’s refreshing that we’re not retreading the same frozen ground. Everything from how you place buildings to how you manage resources and heat your city is a new spin, and its political system is a creative way to interact with the people of New London that does a great job of conveying a sense of quid-pro-quo negotiation in a representative democracy. The zoomed-out perspective does mean that we lose a lot of the feeling of intimacy that made the first game truly stand out, but there’s no shortage of morally questionable decisions to make as you’re building your society.
A frosty atmosphere is strong, thanks to bone-chilling weather effects and dramatic music that swells as tension in your city increases. Coming from a replay of the first Frostpunk, I was initially missing the ability to see people walking in the streets. That said, they do pop up with comments on your actions and an announcer on the loudspeaker gives occasionally amusing remarks on current events, so it doesn’t feel like a ghost town. The map itself is obviously fairly uniform because it’s covered in white snow and ice, but there are features like mountains and cliffs to give each area its own look, and as you build it becomes much more colorful thanks to intricate districts and the automatically created power lines which pulse red when tension runs high.
The five-chapter Story mode serves as something of a tutorial for the sandbox Utopia Builder mode, though aside from a few short cutscenes there isn’t a whole lot of plot driving it. There’s little here beyond a direct bridge between the events of the first game and this one as you take over the city of New London, with the vast majority of story
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