Frostpunk 2 (PC) Review

Frostpunk 2 is not exactly what I expected from a sequel, but it didn’t take long for me to appreciate the shift in gameplay focus. The first game was a gruelling city-builder with choice-driven narrative elements, in which you cautiously expanded your city outwards from the warmth of a central generator, trying to balance resource production, resource consumption, research goals, and survivor demands as temperatures plunged. The basics remain unchanged in Frostpunk 2, but the increased scale and longer timespans result in gameplay that can feel more hands-off, as you juggle supply lines and appease political factions through menus, toggles, and map screens – with less of a focus on traditional city-building optimisations.

As a result, Frostpunk 2 can feel like a pure management game at times – the kind you play from a detached perspective with many basic functions automated. A game in which entertainment comes from analysing numbers, weighing up choices, trying to balance said numbers, watching the consequences play out, and then adapting or iterating upon your plans. It can feel a little underwhelming in the opening hour or two when you’re focussed exclusively on establishing your first generator city, but it starts to make sense once you begin exploring the Frostlands, creating new settlements and supply lines, and dealing with several factions that have divergent ideas about the future of humanity in the frigid post-apocalypse.

This gameplay shift makes a lot of sense when you consider the substantial campaign mode that tackles the fate of the New London survivors from the first game – the “A New Home” scenario –and serves as a lengthy tutorial for the free-form Utopia mode. Thirty years have passed since the city survived the first whiteout and the Steward has recently died (or was possibly murdered by one of the emerging factions). After a brief prologue reveals the presence of other survivors in the Frostlands, a civilian council consisting of centrist New Londoners, traditionalist Stalwarts, and adaptable Frostlanders elects the player as the new Steward and tasks them with both re-establishing coal supply lines for the generator and discovering new fuel sources.

The five-chapter campaign swiftly expands in scope to encompass vast swathes of the Frostland, with events playing out over hundreds of weeks, rather than days, and several locations from the first games scenarios returning – albeit now with canon outcomes. The impact of this expanded scope is that building out your generator city, or other large settlements, feels less hands-on. The core districts of your city – think housing, food production, or resource extraction – are built in a cluster of several titles and provide a supply of resources like the population you draw a workforce and heatstamps from, fuel for the generator, prefab materials for construction, or scouting teams to explore the Frostlands.

A thoughtful, compact city, with carefully placed stockpiles and specialised district buildings, does offer benefits like improving productivity or reducing heat and workforce demands, but you can now deploy frost-breaking teams to clear a linear path to distant coal seams, oil deposits, fertile ground, or frozen lumber, and still build an extraction or farming district far from the generator. Certain sheltered areas also offer heat benefits, so you can even place housing districts further out. Once placed, you sit back and watch roads and heating pipes materialise, while the districts build up dynamically based on the terrain, shape, and any specialised buildings you’ve placed within them. It’s all wonderfully animated and your expansive city can look incredible, but it is a significant change from managing individual worker teams and slowly expanding into radial zones around a generator.

On the upside, it pushes you to engage with the expanded mechanics faster, as your focus shifts from ensuring the survival of a single city and small population, to re-establishing a new society with all the challenges that entails. Cities or settlements become visually spectacular representations of tables and graphs; swelling population numbers are only of interest for the workforce and heatstamps they generate; and the sprawling Frostlands map evolves into an interconnected network of trails and skyways between resource-generating and resource-consuming markers. Coupled with the accelerated passage of time, Frostpunk 2 feels satisfying but less intimate, as you spend more time in menus adjusting the flow of goods between settlements or shifting your workforce between districts based on current demands.

Naturally, the remnants of humanity quickly fall back into old habits, pursuing their favourite excuse to commit savagery when resource scarcity is no longer their primary concern: ideology. Frostpunk 2 has an expansive selection of potential laws that cover everything from heating and housing to immigration, crime, healthcare, and research opportunities – but enforcing a law is no longer your mandate alone, and it needs to pass a vote in the council. This system complicates everything and introduces a divergent path through the campaign. Each faction has an idea on what the future of humanity should look like, but they’re broadly split between adapting to life in the Frostlands or turning the generator cities and settlements into self-sustaining bastions against the cold.

Several choices in the campaign force you to choose a direction, and striking a middle ground is difficult if you’re unwilling to forfeit technological advancements that can generate near-infinite resources. To get a vote passed in the council means assessing the mood of each faction, considering the percentage of the council they hold, and engaging in negotiations; a promise to vote for or against a motion that always comes with conditions attached. Those conditions are often passing a law or research goal that aligns with their ideology, with a bonus to trust gained if you fulfil your promise, and potential backlash if you don’t. Obviously, you can’t please everyone; some factions are more aligned with one another than others; and gaining fervour with any of them – for or against you – can generate instability.

Dominant factions whose laws and traditions you permit might offer to support the city during a crisis, while others might sabotage it to undermine you. It could mean increased productivity in certain sectors, or protests that disrupt output. It’s a constant balancing act, but while finding some degree of balance is ideal, going all in with one faction will unlock more extreme laws and experimental technology to cement their rule. Each of the four difficulty levels adjusts how much trust you gain or lose based on resource scarcity and ideological conflicts, and if the council turns against you, your campaign run is over. It’s worth highlighting at this point there are some arbitrary limitations that feel designed to make life artificially difficult when faced with unexpected campaign choices and political turmoil, such as being unable to mandate a minimum stockpile level of a commodity, or to modify the fuel mix being consumed for the generator.

There’s enough mechanical depth to talk for ages, but to bring this to some sort of conclusion, I’d argue Frostpunk 2 is a fascinating sequel that retains the basic foundations of the original but has a much grander scope. You could dive into the Utopia mode, pick a challenging starting settlement, set your own survival-based victory condition, and crank up the difficulty to better emulate the first game – but Frostpunk 2’s expansive campaign is the highlight. If the first game was about making tough decisions that involved trading a dozen lives for the survival of several hundred, Frostpunk 2 does this on an uncomfortably detached scale as populations swell into the thousands, spread across multiple settlements. It might not be the sequel everyone was expecting, but it feels like a terrifyingly accurate reflection of leadership in a time of crisis, in which your population is no longer a collective of individuals with needs but an ideologically fractious resource you need to maintain.

Frostpunk 2 was reviewed on PC using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher.