As a fan of survival and city builder games, Frost Punk feels like the perfect crossover of my two favourite genres. While I was initially very excited and quite hooked to it, this city builder, sadly, got old quite fast. Like its name suggests, in Frost Punk you'll have to deal with a lot of cold, snow, and ice. Set in an alternate, post-Industrial Revolution steampunk world, you are tasked with helping a fledgling colony survive in a world where the warmth of the sun we know has gone and a landscape of permanent frost and snow takes over. In order to survive, you will have to balance your people's needs with practical decisions, while facing the increasingly harsh climate and the terrible snowstorms that befall your small population. However, that's where the fun stops after a while. After you've started establishing your city and making a couple of difficult decisions here and there, you'll find that the whole game starts to become repetitive. The problem lies in the in-game economy, and this one runs on coal. Because coal is what keeps your settlement running, expect to spend almost all your time either managing its production and stockpiling for the next snowstorm, or finding ways to produce or obtain more coal as you expand your population. While the game's economy also includes other resources, such as wood and steel, those are generally used for building and upgrading and their respective industries can be left alone to run by themselves. All that mattered in Forst Punk, is coal. After more than 30 in-game days of looking at my coal production spreadsheet and the neverending quest for coal was starting to feel tiresome and old. You'll never have enough workers in the game, so you'll always have to find a compromise between coal production and fulfilling your other needs. In the meantime, the weather is only getting harsher so whatever decision you make, in the end, the coal industry always wins.
