Frostpunk

Bought it last night and played the entire campaign today. Got completely absorbed. The game has a lot of flaws but I don't think the difficulty was one of them. I mention this as a lot of people here in the comments complain about the difficult. I managed to complete the campaign on the default difficulty setting (normal i guess, i didn't check), without reading or knowing anything about this game beforehand. Sometimes I was very close to dying. But I guess that is the point. It's no supposed to feel like Sim City Santa's Winterland Edition. A lot of people will die, a lot of bad things will happen. Surviving against the odds makes the game that much more enjoyable. I've never felt like I've been close to or slowly getting closer to dying for like 50% of a playthrough. My only complaint is some of the mechanics broke the immersion and that sometimes it was annoying to micromanage everything. Never played anything like it. Parts of it are completely amazing. I'm glad I didn't read anything about it.

I bought this game on GOG and I really enjoy this game! It is a harsh unforgiving city survival builder with a steep learning curve. Resources are sparce and thats intentional. Don't spoil yourself with the story and don't watch guides, this game is best experienced on your own, learn from your mistakes and make it better next time. Other reviewers complaining about how hard it is to get enough ress: It is intentional! It is meant to be hard. If you enjoy demanding city builders with some hard social decisions to make, pick this up and get ready for a ride. If you bought DLCs or the Game of the Year edition containing all the DLC's note this: The DLC content only gets activated after completing the main campaign for the first time.

This is a city building management with a hostile environment. Your aim is to build a city that can shelter and protect your population from the cruel winter. To aid you on your mission you have researches to do, rules to pass and some extra choices as the days are passing. The game has many scenarios, with some of them being DLC. All scenarios have predefined events which will put you on hard tests with different aims. Still, it offers a modular setting for defining how hard or easy will be each scenario. The environment done by the game is frankly very well executed. However, a flaw of the game is that try to make you to care too much of the population; yet at the same time make it awfully hard to care for the individuals. This is because, even the events in the game will say things like "a guy, a child, a protester" and most of the time you will be inspecting buildings or stats, instead of each individual. Even if you eventually know at the perfection each one of the scenarios, you can always increase the difficult in one or more aspects, or attempt to be less tyrant on the next game. I truly can lose the pass of time with this game.

I spent over 30h with this game and I don't regret it. I really liked the steampunk setting and the storyline, sadly the research trees are rather limited even with DLCs. For my taste too much focus goes into micromanagement and more endeless modes should be available. If you like to focus on a game to pass some time then this might be a good one for you. If you need action or constantly changing environments this is maybe not a good fit for your library.

I could talk about this game for hours, it's one of the best strategy games I ever played, you should check out Youtube clips of people doing deathless runs on Extreme difficulty to see perfect planning and execution. Instead, I'm going to address the most "helpful" review shown here by GOG: > Then, you'll probably start to realize slowly that there isn't really any more to the game other than building tents and collecting resources, upgrades are painfully boring incremental modifiers +10% this or that and all the new buildings you can research are more efficient versions of the starting ones. Well, no, you build a lot more things than tents (lots of other types of housing plus many different types of buildings) and you do a lot more things than collecting resources (laws, special building abilities, scouting, decision making and their consequences) and lots of events that constantly try to throw a wrench in our plans. But what makes everything deep is the fact that strategy (defined as making plans to meet certain expected future needs and executing on them) is very important in this game. It's not just about what to build, but when and where to build it. It's not just about which law to pass, but when to pass it. It's not about collecting some resources, it's about how much of them you collect (collecting too much is a problem too) and when you need them. And it's not about sending out scouts but when to send them out, towards which destination, in which order and when to bring them back home. All of these decisions have to be done more or less perfectly, especially on higher difficulty levels. This makes the game a pleasure for the type of player that likes a fair challenge, where the game may seem very hard and impossible (on some difficulties) it actually isn't, if you do it right and try to micro-manage and optimize everything. Everything else (fantastic musical score, great artwork, interesting lore, etc) is just adding to an otherwise great game package.