Frostpunk 2 Review: I Became a Dictator Because Everyone Was So Damn Annoying

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Frostpunk 2 was an ambitious gambit. After achieving survival, and the perfect sinister advisor introducing whispers of evil Tory ideas, the entire city you built in Frostpunk is now just the headquarters for a immense expansion effort, and your rule is no longer absolute. Instead of repeating the same venerable “prepare for ultra winter” message, your biggest obstacle will likely be your own people, now formed into shifting political parties and looking outward through colonial eyes. The result is a complicated, laborious survival citybuilder that is two parts addictive and one part frustrating for all the wrong reasons.

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It’s more political, in a word. Your predecessor may have been a monster, but there was no denying that without Some absolute leadership, everyone would die horribly. Here, that’s less certain, so you’re dependent on overt bargaining with nascent social groups that vote directly on every law and even propose their own. Every law, every building, every research project pulls the “zeitgeist” toward one of six values, such as Adaptability, Tradition, and Equality, in addition to their practical effects. Factions favor different values, and radicals are also differentiated by mutually exclusive agendas for all the resources you’ll gather from the world.


Image Source: Rock Paper Shotgun/11 bit studios

There are too many ways you and the factions can interact to list them all, and too few to do anything about the huge problems they will clearly cause in the long run. The early chapters are simple politically, because you promise everyone the simple things you already wanted in exchange for legislation that creates the society you want. But by the middle of my game, most of the factions wanted things that would only screw everything up. In particular, they tried to repeal the law that cut our fuel consumption in half in favor of a completely useless stream of building materials, when you literally freeze to death and vote to get rid of the heatidiots.

One faction happily went out into the white night against my orders to bring food when we already had three times more than we needed. When the time finally came to decide whose grand plan I would enact, the other faction complained that it was killing them and began sabotaging buildings that prevented the very deaths they were protesting.

This happened long after the first political protest by the Stalwart faction, which I had left alone, deciding it was best to let them march and occupy things and then make some concessions. They murdered 500 people. Then another 500. This went on until I sent in the guards, and the thirty deaths resulting from that, the game told me, had “radicalized” the Stalwarts. Somehow the word on the street was that the people who had massacred a tenth of the population because I refused to investigate the “Prisoners of Thought Correction” were normal, sensible guys, and I was a tyrant for stopping them. Why had I created a propaganda network?

The problem is that by moving from survival to realpolitik, Frostpunk 2 becomes a management game that’s all about leadership, but doesn’t give you enough resources to actually lead. It’s telling that as soon as the game unlocked the option to simply take both radical factions—the Stalwarts were responsible for 85% of our deaths, but the others were trying to enslave all the women, turn all the children into soldiers, and apply eugenics on the “weak”—I did so immediately and won the game. Sure, one of the survivors might try to kill me, but that’s only because the game forced me to put them in isolated “enclave” districts instead of shooting them all, who now totaled 1% of the population. I could have probably won with a peace deal or by building them their own independent colony, but a) fuck these psychopaths and b) they sounded like such a chore.


We take a look at the rift in the stable in Frostpunk 2.


In Frostpunk 2 a new law was passed.

Image Source: Rock Paper Shotgun/11 bit studios

While you’re fighting factions, you see, you’re also building (visually similar) districts around the city to gather resources, preferably around bonus nodes, with expansion buildings included to customize the districts to a fairly intricate degree. Maybe you’ll process materials into coal, which in turn into oil. Factories could process some materials, residential buildings could have a guard post, hospital or prison, a logistics district could be an expansion that helps its explorers work faster around the map. Many of these allow special actions that can trigger events, and don’t forget that all of them can please a faction and push the zeitgeist somewhere. Oh, and your eastern colony has no food, while the other’s supplies are full, and the council voted without you. No, we didn’t tell you that, nor did we assign those workers for you. We were too busy pausing the game with inaudible audio alerts (but still forcing you to scroll around the map to find their source) and pop-up messages that disappeared when you pressed space, which also paused the game.

You build colonies, too. Many locations provide resources or immigrants, subplots with multiple solutions, and sometimes a colony site that you build from the ground up, like a city, and then balance exports and supplies, and potentially ongoing events. Its world map suffers the same fate as post-Frostpunk survival builders like Endzone and New Cycle; parts of it distract from the settlement, and other parts are a reductive, forgotten chore. And you have breaks all the time. Some of the rules had consequences, will you change them? A certain man has some (great) flavor text. A problem you’ve already solved is still solved. The nomads are grateful that you sacrificed a lot of oil, and now they want a gigantic supply of oil that you don’t have because you gave it away, oh my god, fuck off.


Mantras before taking an ice bath in Frostpunk 2.
Image Source: Rock Paper Shotgun/11 bit studios

It’s really nippy that there’s so much detail that specific combinations of laws can cause unique problems. That means that the mere possibility of unintended consequences makes you wary of things that seem mechanically useful. But it’s all way, way too much. I was crying out for someone to hand this quest over to within two chapters, and while I’m curious about the alternate endings and events, the process of building and finding resources and manual adjustment of each individual district when population decline is too exhausting a prospect for a society that I have no reason to care about without the motivating threat of extinction. There is only expansion for expansion’s sake. I don’t think someone has a balanced plan here and there is no one to like.

I want to love Frostpunk 2, and I think that’s why so much of this review is negative. It deserves credit for daring to push itself into something up-to-date rather than playing it secure. It’s far more compelling, fascinating, and super atmospheric than its peers, but that ambition comes at the cost of a unique intensity and focus that makes its fresh narrative and design too conflicted to elevate it to the same heights.


This review is based on a test version of the game provided by the publisher.

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