Frostpunk: The Last Autumn

In this expansion you start without snow, and actually collecting coal is useless. It's autumn, and you're assigned to build a generator. You have a timeline and need to complete stages of the generator on time, otherwise... you can guess what happens. In the meantime, it starts snowing... It's a fresh look at the same game, the city is still circular, but now the centre is a huge construction site. New buildings, resources and technology. And new problems, as this time it's not cold that bites you most. This time the workers are there for the money, so if they don't like the environment, they're going to strike, and you need to improve the conditions, or face the delays. And one more thing: do you prefer the workers or the engineers?... Interesting and demanding. And irritating, especially when you have a tight timeline, and your workers begin a strike... Definitely worth playing!

I love original game and I like expansion. Although expansion is bringing only one scenario, its different from original and there is a lot of work behind. You will ecounter different laws, technologies, story and goals. Now I will talk about what is not writen as description on store page. Game story contain a lot of bugs which drive me crazy. Sometime you learn about bug too late and option is restarting the scenario. I remember when I "lost" my book of laws for first time. I tried scenario again and again, afterwards with frustration I turn out to online search and learned about bug. In case you do not follow advised tech and choose diferently, it will happen. Summarized. If you like original game, play Last Autumn. It will give you new, slightly different experience and this should be exactly purpose of expansions! My personal advise, wait for patch or search online how to avoid bugs.

I love the base game and the Winterhome and Arks scenarios, but this scenario fell really flat for me. The pacing and balance is just off from the start. It's overwhelmingly punishing in certain respects and makes the scenario feel much more linear and logistical. I quickly stopped feeling anything for the story side and just started seeing what was a very narrow efficiency puzzle. The main reason for this is that unlike other scenarios, the emotional relationship between you and your workers makes no sense, and the story elements are very forced and subsequently feel very artificial and detached. You sacrifice progress to save workers: the workers revolt against you because you value the job over anything else? The workers go on strike because you aren't meeting their demands.... but you've already put in every pro-worker measure possible? In my game they started demanding I build something I already built and didn't need, so I just built one for them and once they were appeased I immediately dismantled it. That is this scenario in a nutshell. The in-game actions to solve the puzzle are so discordant with the narrative framework in which they're presented that the narrative ceased to matter. In the other scenarios I was really emotionally affected when workers were dying or struggling, and balancing their needs with the needs of the task was an actual dilemma. In the Last Autumn? I didn't care. Bust the strike, motivation is already zero and the discord is already high with no tools properly mitigate it. Oh some people might die? Good then I can repatriate the corpses and recover some motivation (yes this works). Plus the writing is a big step down. Bad omen owls? THAT'S what has people spooked when the world around them is crumbling apart? "Where do these tracks lead?" Nowhere. Plus it's pretty buggy in a few places. Boo. I would pass on this one if you're contemplating it.

The issue with the base game, is that once you know and understand the game mechanics, winning is no longer a challenge. There's primarily one path to victory... or if not one, two functionally similar paths. It's more of a puzzle than a creative city builder; I appreciate the challenge and change of pace from most city builders, and have loved my experience; but it lacks replayability. This DLC "fixes" the issue, by offering a very different senario, with new buildings, laws, objectives, and challenges. It is a challenging map, that was a ton of fun to play. Instead of the Theocratic/Authoritarian branches of the base game, you have communist/capitalist. I just wish those branches could carry over into the endless maps... Unfortanately they can't, due to the very different mechanics. In fairness, it's a little pricy, clocking in at more than half the price of the base game. Still, I love the devs, and this expansion absolutely took a ton of hard work. Still, I recommend getting it through the season pass on discount.