Fantastic game and sequel to the first Frostpunk which I enjoyed greatly. Atmosphere is absolute 5 star as before, including music, UI design, and general art style. Really impressive how much emotion you can get across with just some slideshows and moving pictures. Gameplay is engaging and there are multiple ways that your campaign might turn out. After finishing my first playthrough I immediately began my second, which is as good of a compliment on a game as it gets. The negatives and reason why it doesn't get 5 stars is due to very poor late game performance. The sound crackling is terrible once you get a large number of districts, framerate slows down to a crawl, and you better be prepared to save every 5 minutes to not lose too much progress when the game inevitably freezes. Be prepared for a VERY slow and very frustrating last 1-2 hours of the game. A minor nitpick is that the campaign is significantly easier then the first one. On the hardest difficulty in Frostpunk 1 you had to have a rock solid build order to not lose the game, while this one is far more forgiving.
A great combination of complexity, abstraction, realism, and asethetics. There are a number of bugs (like high tech industries not providing jobs for high wealth residences, or less than stellar out of the box traffic AI) that you will need to work around, but the game is largely tough but fair. The only complaint is that unlike Simcity 3000 this entry is too dificult and complex for younger players, and don't be surprised that it will take you years to figure out how to build a great city.
This review is coming from someone who loves pathologic 2 and considers it a masterpiece. Don't bother with this DLC. It's an aimless item hunt that has little bearing on the plot and doesn't reveal anything interesting about the world or characters. It wasn't worth it at 80% off and at full 10$ it's robbery. I was supremely disappointed when I played this after just completing the main game, which itself was fantastic. Reading a little more into it is sounds like this was just a free demo and proof of concept released before pathologic 2 actually came out and it shows.
After 25 hours I gave up on the game. While the atmosphere and concept are top notch, I found the difficulty completely unnecessary and detrimental to the experience. Too many wall jump sections that go on forever and require perfect timing, too many water tunnels that don't allow for a pixel of missed movement, too many pixel perfect jumps, and too many occasions where you're completely reliant on the right monster spawning, or the wrong enemy not spawning. Add to this obscene amount of back tracking (unless you use a guide, but then what's the point of an exploration game?) and you have a recipe for one frustrating game. I rate games on enjoyment, not on how theoretically good a game is, and in the end I just did not enjoy this one.
