Frostpunk 2

Unfortunetly, I can't say that I have a good time with this sequel. My rating is 3.5 stars. I'm in the third chapter and restarted a few times on officer. I wil list only the things I don't like (stars do the rest). Here are the reasons: - micro to macro: in the first opus, you needed to manage each and every person in the colony, now you do it the macro way: in bulk, which I dislike a lot. - the district system is a good idea, but managing them is a hassle (or at least I did not see a resumé window for them) - quite often you find yourself in a very dire situtation without even knowing why.Informations are not very easy to find. - time is now mainly in weeks, but ressources are managed in days which can be quite confusing. The previous point are mainly why I don't enjoy the game. It lost it's keystone, wich is a sense of empathy, resilience, despair and hope. Now you manage a growing city in bulk, without a sense of duty or survival: if you fail, that's it, reload ; if you pass, good, to the next objective. - tutorial is not intuitive -pop-up windows are in the way when construting districts - no résumé windows for nothing - the story is continuous, wich mean you cannot choose at wich chapter you want to start (I hate repeat the prologue...) All in all the game is not bad at all, and is quite beautiful. Some new mechanics are interesting. But as I said, it lost it's keystone.

Some people don't care for how the city building has changed and the scale increase, I like it fine, the problem is how it and all the other mechanics introduce so much pressure and tension. This is the fundamental problem with games like this and cities skylines. There's approximately one correct way to do things in such a way that the game actually becomes pleasant to play, the more you deviate from this one correct path, the more frustrating and stressful the game becomes in proportion. This becomes clear RIGHT from the get-go where they fail to explain the fundamental district synergy mechanics you need to know to even get your city off the ground and get past the first two hours of the game. Even then, when you're doing what you're supposed to do, you end up sitting their, not playing the game waiting for your resources to tick up so you can actually build something. This wasn't the case in Frostpunk 1 because you could always pull laborers from whatever job they were doing, Now, the economy's scale has increased to such a point that there's no point in pulling people off of jobs because it won't even get close to solving the problem, even in the short term like in the first game. You just end up endlessly holding the 3x speed button waiting for heatstamps or materials or prefabs or laborers so you can desperately try and shore up literally every resource in the game that you're somehow not making enough of. And all the while you're doing that the games punishing you by killing people with frostbite or increasing the tension or lowering trust, the first game walked a very fine balance with the amount of stress that was in it, this game I think they've gone overboard and introduced too much friction between all the mechanics. It just rapidly devolves into hold 3x speed and wait simulator while you slowly lose the game.

I loathe games where mechanics are presented, and then the game intentionally breaks the expressed mechanics. e.g., you are required to "grant agenda" to a faction, but the faction robs you of the ability to grant the agenda to them (by forcing you to accept their agenda without input) and then they get angry that they got their way (because they forced you to accept their agenda in council, not letting you grant them their agenda.) There are other problems with the game mechanics as well that most players will likely overlook given the dark setting and the implied difficulty of the frozen world. (In a world where humans are at the precipice of extinction, when you fill your storage, you just throw away excess instead of forcing a slow down in production of a good-- Manually controlling production to prevent waste is a hugely tedious element of Frostpunk gameplay.) I could keep going but there is a character limit on the review. As many reviews have noted, the game offers virtually no tutorial. This exacerbates the frustration I have with terribly designed game mechanics-- it communicates to me that they did not feel like they could not risk explaining the game mechanics without further illuminating the liberties they take with breaking the rules they set in the game. Furthermore, this game is more strategic and for all the flavor animations, when you get 1200 automaton workers, there is virtually no effect on the animations presented. This breaks immersion, as you zoom down to the district furnaces that were once the center of your Frostpunk (1) city center. I really enjoyed the original Frostpunk prior to DLC. The DLC did a lot of this as well. This game has permanently soured me on any future 11bit studios games. TLDR; Frostpunk 2 dares you to believe that they have dreamed bigger, but it ends up feeling almost entirely smoke and mirrors. If I could refund, I would.

After investing a few hundred hours into the first, I was extremely excited about the sequel. It however, seems to have lost what made the first game so special. The original was a completely new take on an old formula. This game feels a lot more like every other city builder out there. It's just Tropico without the humor or sunshine or (sofar) fun...It's still a good game and worth a play, but it's probably not gonna be in my list of favorites like the first was.

The modding kit is not available here at GoG. What's more is that you need neither Steam or Epic Games to access this and they both require their client software.