Frostpunk

This game has an impressive setting and story but sadly the game is a simulator/strategy game with heavy focus on resourcemanagement and timemanagement. This focus in gameplay reduces the population of your city to "numbers", they are ants that does what needs to be done to creep closer to the next objective of the game. Because of this the "moral" choices never have any ethic/moral weight to them at all, you will pick the choice that makes the most sense to progress in the game. If that means putting the children to work in the factories or building carecenters where they will assist with research is a choice made by necessity. So that aspect of the game is basically nullified, what about they gameplay you ask? It is a drag, sadly for 60% of the time I spent playing this game I wished I was doing something else. Its busy work, a strategy game with a puase button where you need to micromanage stuff all the time. It is not fun stuff either, put on heater, shutdown heaters, add workers, take away workes most of the time playing this game you will do mundane task with little to none strategic relevance. The interesting choices you make in this game feel few and far apart due to the oceans of meaningless micromanaging that is needed to maximise the chances of the citys survival. I mean you could just let the time roll on and hope for the best and I did that multiple times. Sad when you realise you are purposefully skipping the gameplay due to boredom even though you know it lessens your success of victory in the end.

This game is vastly overrated. I suspect most people giving it high scores have played one campaign on normal, got overwhelmed by beautiful graphics, music and writing, as I was at first and then forgot about it. The game suffers heavily from Early Game Hell syndrome, where playing early game is the only part worth playing that provides any difficulties. I've played main scenario on normal, hard and extreme, but all of the challenge is in the first week. After that, all you have to do is upgrade your wood and steel production, so that you have a reasonable margin to build on and as much coal and food as possible. Congratulations, you've beaten the game. The strategic "choices" that the game throws at you is managing discontent/hope and choosing between two ways of making a resource. The two ways are: the more efficient one, that costs a limited resource of steam cores, and less efficient one, where you have to use more workers for less resource, but it doesn't cost you steam cores. So in "Ark" scenario, where you have only 45 workers you use only steam core branches, in "Refugee" scenario, where you have very little steam cores on the map and a lot of people, you use only labour heavy branches, and in other scenarios you commit half of your resource production to one branch and other half to the other. That's it. Discontent/hope management is similarly laughable. Most of the time one comes at cost of the other, so you just keep discontent at almost maximum level and pump as much hope as you can. It pays to keep your people's lives more miserable than they have to be, so that you get easy quests for more hope. The Order/Faith choices are inconsequential. All they differ in is that they have slightly different boosters: order raises your hope passively through guard towers, hope actively through special buttons in the church. If you plan to buy this 30$ game for one 5-hour long playthrough, go ahead. If you want to get it's money's worth out of it, don't.

First Scenario done.... 1) Easy is hard enough for a first play (4-5 hours) 2) You'll be busy all the time 3) Endgame may frustrate/surprise (its a scripted event you cant really delay) you, make saves 4) Runs on minimum in 1080p on a I7 860 with 8GB RAM and a Radeon HD 5870 with the occasional half sec. stutter. (~580 inhabitants) -1 for the endgame script (no real delay possible, illogical effects, aka buildings stop working despite being warm enough) -1 for missing endless mode

If anyone wants to buy the game, go for the basic version, which is cheap and nice. And as an atmospheric survival city builder I would recommend it. (If you get it for <15USD) While the basegame was of awesome quality for the price, the DLC feel like a cashgrab. They are more like additional scenarios as with 90s games, where you bought new maps for age of empires 1/2. NOT like the Diablo 2 add on "lord of destruction" which actually changed the whole game. Worse yet, the scenarios are >90% linear, means replayability is LOW. The ENDLESS mode has 3 scenarios and once you hit a sweet-spot of resources, tech and buldings all difficulty just vanishes. No more progress, nothing. And "ENDLESS" is kind of misleading as you have the same tech and building limits as in the base scenario, no additional tech, no additional buildings, no additional laws. NOTHING. Just the worldmap gets reset after each great storm. They could have added so much, made this game, this universe so big. But they have many projects and surely must spread their resources themselves. And like in their final DLC "The Rifts" the promise and the start were great, but the disappointment and rebellion had to follow.

Dear 11 bit studios, If you're going to shamelessly promote your new game every single time I start your old game, you should, at the very least, have the decency to add a little option called CLICK HERE IF YOU DO NOT GIVE A RAT'S ASS ABOUT FROSTPUNK 2 AND DO NOT WANT TO BE BOTHERED WITH THIS EVER AGAIN. Yours, A very anoyed gamer you'll not be getting any wishlisting or money from.