Really, the mechanics of the game are fun. They know how to make a fun game. The trick is to force the gamer to make constant choices. But this is what I consider game fatigue. There is no free time in a game, there is constantly some kind of trial.
Most of those trials are negative events, not positive ones. I pay money to play this game, but there are more irritations and trials than positives in the game, so while the game mechanics are enjoyable, the game scenarios are not. The trials are endured and the town develops, but the citizens don't know contentment. The game lacks positive feedback. It's becoming more of a chore than my life and I'm not enjoying it because there's no reward for solving so many problems.
Why should I get involved in something that is more trouble than my life in the name of a game?
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.
Another 11bit game, another masterpiece. How do they do it? As I read the negative or partially negative reviews I see one common complaint - not fleshed out enough. Potential not fulfilled. I think people want this game to be something it is not. It's not a city builder. It's not sandbox like Simcity or Skyline. Frostpunk is the exact opposite from a sandbox where sky is the limit. Frostpunk is all about limits. It's a survival strategy game, maybe the first of its kind. That's why I think the Endless mode was a mistake. The developers caved to a popular demand but this game was not designed to be and endless sandbox and it shows. Where it absolutely excels though are the story-driven, scripted scenarios. Frostpunk is basically This War of Mine, only scaled up to a city level. Instead of a few refugees you're trying to keep alive an entire city, while scavenging around for resources. As such, it's glorious.
I've spent 250 hours playing this game so far. Bought it when it only had 3 scenarios and played them to death, trying to get all the achievements. Then left the game because... well, the scenarios are pretty linear.
When the endless mode update came out, followed by fall of winterhome, I got back into it. Endless mode is great fun - 4 different map types, each with its own pros and cons, and the usual difficulty levels - mean hours of play and experimentation.
I'm hoping for one more update - the end of the cold. You find out what happened and why and get to fix it. I'd love for that to happen.
I've really enjoyed playing this game, and I have lots of praise for it.
But then, there are some game mechanics that put me off. And so much so that they kill the entertainment.
Let's have a look at "The Londoners". The way to handle it is to make sure that the Hope metric is increased again.
I had trouble dealing with raising and keeping hope, so I googled it to get some hints.
Turns out that the only really successful tactic that people seem to favor is... brace yourselves... to KNOW that this element is coming into play and purposefully _not_ fulfill hope-raising tasks/quests that the game asks you to do until after the event is triggered.
The measures I could employ at that point in my game were nowhere near enough. I had an almost full Hope-meter before, but it dropped to almost 0 when this happens. There are almost no means to build it back up again, but I managed to slow down their recruitment. And then... it gets colder. Which makes my promise to keep tents heated broken, because the heat went below acceptable parameters for __a few seconds __ before I cranked up the generator. And what's the result of this? The hope-meter dives to almost zero again. And this basically means that I'm screwed, as there doesn't seem to be much I can do to recover at this point. Where's the realism in this? "OH NO, THEY RESPONDED TO THE DROPPING TEMPERATURE BY INCREASING THE GENERATOR OUTPUT A FEW SECONDS TOO LATE! WE ARE ALL DOOOOMED!!! AND ALSO I WAS AT WORK, SO I DIDN'T EVEN NOTICE. BUT WE'RE STILL DOOOMED! ABANDON ALL HOPE!". It's just ridiculous.
By all means, bring the challenge - but make it fair. If you're supposed to deal with seemingly random problems by having plowed hours into the game and failed before only to have to do it all over again... probably only to fall victim to another seemingly random and unrecoverable (yet by the game pre-determined) event like this... well, then the game is broken by design.
