Frostpunk 2

While avid Frostpunk 1 fans rightfully criticize its sequel's departure from the original gameplay, even after an hour, the changes are obvious to me. Instead of directing individual citizens, FP2 shifts to global oversight through distant tile selections and mass ice breaking. After selecting tiles, you no longer see people trudging through snow, forming networks of paths that the drifts slowly reclaim. This new approach feels both freeing and restricting in its execution. FP2's building and ice breaking animations exist, but the camera feels too distant or confined and strips away the sense of immediacy that FP1 maintained. Arriving at a near-completed city with its broken Heater (after the train), you feel the diminished stakes. The survival narrative loses its bite. FP1's Steam Heater became the lifeline of your settlement. Through each harsh day, building your city felt meaningful. That connection is missing in FP2. You inherit an established city's management, overseeing existing technology and infrastructure. The shift from personal oversight to political administrator dulls the urgency of protecting citizens from the frost. While the abrupt introduction to these changes gives pause, FP2 deserves credit for its reimagined visuals that honor the original's spirit. The soundtrack carries weight, and the menus might be too clean in design but their form fits the overall aesthetic. I do intend to play further and discover what there is to like about Frostpunk 2 as I progress.

Game lags badly even at lowest possible settings. Seriously lacks optemization. World map ridiculous zoomed in on ultrawide screen display. "Infinite deposits" do run out. Game balance is broken. Depends too much on combining bonuses from 10 different game mechanics to succeed; leads to the other major issue which is that the game is overly dependent on mechanics and micromanaging the wrong things. They abstracted out every mechanic from the first game, and then build twice as many things to manage in the second. They took away the uniqueness of the circle layouts, replaced it with generic hexagon based districts with very poorly explained rules and bonuses. They just ripped ideas and design of other games in the city building genre instead of refining what made the orignal Frostpunk unique and great. Seems like the designers overly focused on visual art instead of story, mechanics instead of entertainment, and went down a rabbit hole instead of well rounding the game. The 'steeewwwwaard, steward, STEWart!" sound effects are just really, really annoying after a while. It's just not fun to play. I put plenty of hours into it, but the game is stressful, overly complicated for the sake of complication, and somehwhat boring. Overall. this is an extremely mediocre sequel to a way better game. I really wish I had waited until this was on sale instead of buying two new copies for myself and my wife. In it's current state, it's worth half what they are charging for it.

Frostpunk 2 is wonderful. I enjoyed the 1st game very much, and this is an excellent sequel. Its similar to the first game but different enough to feel like a fresh challenge.

I turn off "smooth scrolling" everywhere I can in other apps because it's not smooth scrolling, but slow scrolling, which makes me obnoxious. This game takes it to another level that when I click on something, the camera actively pans away non-linearly. I have to chase the camera every time I want to do anything. I complained about that issue in the pre-launch access feedback form since I preordered the game, but that was Sep 2024 (it's May 2025 now). I haven't seen any change to address it at all. If you ask me, I don't think the UI designer played this game. Besides that, this game shouldn't be called Frostpunk. It took away the meaning of every decision in the first game. To me, it's all just political squabbles for the sake of having something to manage in the game. You don't interact with the city or its construction; you deal with factions and their never ending conflict.

I really enjoyed the first instalment... And hoped the second will bring more improvemnts etc. Unfortunetly the game is very boring, I feel I have no decisions to make as I am so much constrained that there is only one path that I have to follow. Plus I am lost in UI. I don't know what is what, why I do this and that, is it working already? And the game is frustrating in a bad way, I can't see what I could do better playing it the second time etc. Why they switched to Unreal? No idea, game is not fluid sometimes on my rtx4090... why? Music is not so good as well. Managing town from such a high level make me feel completly disconnected and at the same time I need to fiddle with repetetive details. To me it is a big disappointemnt and proof that sequels should simply focus on making the same game better and not try to make it bigger, harderd and more epic... The beauty lies in simplicity and personal connection to what is happening. Here I feel like playing Simcity with some weird settings to make my game experience horrible...