I've been on a quest to play through a bunch of city builder games and this was in a bunch of list so I thought I'd give it a try before comitting to the sequel. Right off the bat I was hooked. I made some critical mistakes but I survived on my first play through and I never even unlocked the last tech tier. I never even built a steam powered mine. After surviving the basic story mode I didn't really have any desire to start it again and try to do it better. I don't think there was much of a reward to finishing. On a different note: For some reason Frostpunk ran my gpu hotter than any other game I've played this year. With the graphics settings on the low it was still running my gpu hotter than Cyberpunk 2077 or Path of Exile with high settings. There was nothing lost for me when using the lower graphics settings on this game and I wish I could turn the graphics detail down even further. I would love a more old school pixel version of this game with more, and better music. I would say it's worth a play through when you can get it on discount but after replaying the older Simcity games this year I am reminded why some games are timeless and some are not. Ten years from now I doubt I'll even remember having played Frostpunk unless the series takes a turn and has a mega hit after a couple sequels or something. I'll keep an eye out but I'm on to other things in the meantime.
The story is very nice and relaxing and definitely makes me think about my family and memories I have with them, though the voice acting or voice direction was a bit amateurish and was difficult to get fully invested in the characters. It's unusual for a game to have a personal diary kind of vibe so I appreciate the effort and would love to see that expanded on with a more experienced crew. The look of the game is very basic. Though there are some beautiful aspects to it, the beginner level textures and lighting effects are distracting and it's not clear if some of it is an artistic choice or an oversight, like a wet surface reflection smoothly transitioning from the ground up onto the sides of mountains. I couldn't tell if I was supposed to be walking through a pond and there was a lot of water coming down the hills or what exactly was going on there. There's a lot of things in the game that seem pointless because they only occur once and have no consequence later on, which left me feeling like I didn't really do anything important or make any decisions worth remembering or like I should try to do better on another play through. I also wished this game had an auto run button or a full sprint. I never used the slow walk and the trot was ok but some of the distances are long so a faster pace would feel nice. I had to take a break a couple of times just to give my finger a rest from holding the forward direction the whole time. The fox is poorly animated and at times feels like you're moving around an inanimate object in an unfinished 3d landscape. I know some people liked the music but I found it a bit boring. It made the whole game feel like I was being forced to sit through an overwrought open mic performance by a born again christian who just graduated from berklee college of music. I have to ask, was this a Christian thing? Is the first tree a christian reference, like the biblical tree of life?
I get it, shooter games are popular, but is a world full of rampant nonstop gun violence and cars really in the tradition of the cyberpunk ethos? I guess if your gateway to cyberpunk is through modern movies then it's gotta have lots of shooting, but if you're a fan of any of the cyberpunk authors like William Gibson then you'll probably be disappointed. I can imagine lots of different variations of how the future world could be shaped and what it would actually feel like to live there and this game lets you play out just one. If I lived around that kind of technology and black market drugs the last thing I would care about would be guns and cars unless it were just some fleeting military fetish. Starting out it almost feels like you can do anything but ultimately you're given only one approach option...killer for hire. You can't decide to become a ripperdoc, or a trader, or a hacker, or start a brothel, or sell hijacked flying cars, or become a drugged out hologram graffiti artist. Also, instead of street fights for money, there should be implant aided drone racing or drone dog fighting and you have to decide how much money you want to put into modding your implants and your drone...easy side quest material. Overall it just feels like a slightly less vibrant grand theft auto placed in a techno dystopia. Maybe someday Larian will make a cyberpunk game based on the Divinity 4.0 engine and we can get real rpg options in a technofuturist environment.
