I can’t remember every interaction I had with the advisers in Civilization games, but I don’t believe I ever had to send my guards to put down a protest one of them staged in a new settlement.
Nor could I ask any of them for “Favours” to scrape a few more heat stamps necessary for a new food district, indebting me to them at some future point when they decide they’ve had enough of some other faction’s people and ideas. In Frostpunk 2 (out today), the people who pop up to tell you how they’re feeling aren’t just helpful indicators, they’re a vital part of the strategy. To keep these people going, you’ve got to make some of them mad, some of them happy, and balance a ledger of all you’ve gained and demanded from them.
That’s the biggest difference you’ll notice in Frostpunk 2 if you’re coming from the original. The original had you making choices that affected people, but you were the Captain, in full control of your people, at least until you angered them enough to revolt. In Frostpunk 2, you manage factions and communities rather than groups of survivors. You place districts, not hospitals. Time moves in days and weeks, not hours. You play multiple chapters across a landscape in a world that is 30 years removed from its initial peril.
The challenge of Frostpunk 2 is no longer simply getting everyone through this winter. There is now some thought of what kind of people you want to be once you have enough fuel, food, and children. Are you in managed decline, or can you build something better, despite the world trying to kill you?
11 Bit Studios
You’re still building a city in a radius around the generator, but it’s big hexes and districts, not buildings on grids.
11 Bit Studios
11 Bit Studios
When your city gets built up, it can be mesmerizing to just watch it glow.
11 Bit Studios
11 Bit Studios
Exploring the places beyond your city’s reach can be rewarding, and risky, of course.
11 Bit Studios
When your city gets built up, it can be mesmerizing to just watch it glow.
11 Bit Studios
Exploring the places beyond your city’s reach can be rewarding, and risky, of course.
11 Bit Studios
11 Bit Studios
11 Bit Studios
A beautiful grid with brutal choices
Those are the big-picture changes to Frostpunk 2. At the ground level, the general feeling is quite familiar. It’s cold, it sometimes gets colder, and there’s a furnace to feed. This time, you need to do “Icebreaking” to unlock tiles for development, but you don’t have to worry so much about the exact placement of individual bits. Your colony or city will link itself up and look beautiful in the game’s grim Victorian cryo-future style. You have to figure out how to scrimp the resources to put an extraction district on the oil reserves, making enough heat for the residents to stop getting sick so you can then send them out to recover goods from a decimated wagon and then icebreak some more toward a food source, all while planning to build a research center and council building.
