Over the years I’ve noticed trends in sequel games. For AAA’s and similar high budget titles there’s a tendency to streamline things, to focus more in on what made the original great and to give players more of that. Others, usually those smaller titles that punched well above their weight, expand their vision and try to reach for even greater heights. There are also those who decide to choose neither of these parts and just deliver the same thing again with small trimmings around the side, either leaning hard on other elements like the narrative (or, more insidiously, their playerbase’s loyalty) to carry the title to commercial success. Frostpunk 2 is the middle option, taking a game that was already great and elevating it to the next level. Everything about Frostpunk 2 is what you liked about the original but more, done better with a grander vision driving it all.
It has been 30 long years since the Captain brought us to the last engine and ensured humanity’s survival. But he nears the end of his life and New London is now at a crossroads: the population grows and the coal that provides heat for the city is running low. You are the steward, second in command to the Captain, and you are now charged with ensuring that the colony continues to survive. How will you guide these people? Will you rely on faith, using the people’s hope for a better future to drive them forward? Or will you prefer order, a hand of iron that can make the hard decisions when no one else will? The choice is yours steward.
Frostpunk 2 keeps the original’s aesthetic and dials it up several notches. The amount of detail in all the environments is absolutely phenomenal: from the wide open vistas that you’ll scroll over many times to the ability to zoom right down into the district level and see individual people moving around. There’s no holds barred on modern effects to, most noticeably the liberal use of smoke and particle effects to give you a realistic envisioning of a snow blanketed world. Backing this up is an incredible soundtrack that goes way harder than it has any right to. Those oppressive tones, those violins pricking at you with their stabs of tension, all of it just comes together so well. This, it feels, is the vision that the devs had for the game already. They just needed the capital to make it come true.
The core of Frostpunk remains the same in this sequel, it being a scenario based city builder that focuses on surviving against the cold. You’ll still be managing heat output from the generator, ensuring you have a good source of fuel, sheltering all your people and ensuring that they’re all fed. Laid on top of this though is a new and rather in-depth political simulator requiring you to negotiate with a number of different factions that have arisen within the populace. As you’d expect these all have differing wants and needs but they also wish to see their vision for the future of the colony realised. What this means is that every choice you make, from the laws you pass to the technology you research, has an impact on them and their view of you. Whilst this seems minor and somewhat manageable at the start it will quickly arise into serious trouble for you should you ignore a particular faction’s desires for too long. You’ll also be managing more than one colony at a time now too, necessitating things like balancing resource usage and generation between sites. You’ll also be exploring a large map now for resources, events and other campaign related objectives. If I’m honest it was a lot to take in initially, so much so that in my second attempt at the prologue I got it done in about a tenth of the time it took me originally.
In true city builder survival fashion the game gets you going with a good set of basics to begin with, ensuring you’re familiar with the more relevant metrics that you’ll need to be tracking as the game goes on. Whilst later sections do show you some more in-depth things there’s still quite a lot of the game that’s left unexplained to you, instead left there for you to discover as you work your way through the main campaign, tech trees and certain events as they pop up. This does make the game’s opening hours some of the toughest, something the game is aware of and tries to soften the blow with you about failure not being the end of everything. That being said I did manage to make it successfully through my first playthrough, although I was truly not aware of most of the things I was doing until right towards the end.
The game feels a lot more open than its predecessor did and not just because you have a vast map to explore. No there are far more options available to you to address the challenges you face which is going to add a lot of replayability to the game. For instance in my playthrough I managed to stumble across a substantial coal vein early on in my explorations, something which then gave me a ton of breathing room with…well basically everything as I wasn’t forced to abandon my coal infrastructure as early as I otherwise would have. There’s also a lot of events that you can trigger at your own leisure too, all of which you’ll know the outcome of what they are before you trigger them. This allows you to plan in advance for certain things (like taking in more settlers) which makes those events far less disruptive than they have been in the past. To be sure there are other events that still throw a non-trivial amount of chaos into the mix, but it definitely feels easier to accommodate those than it previously did.
The inclusion of the politics layer is an interesting one as it goes much further than the Faith vs Order choices we had in the previous game. Depending on the choices you make at certain times different factions will show up and those that are loyal to you initially will change depending on your actions in the prologue. Even taking the same courses of action will likely still net you a different set of factions, something I discovered when I started a second playthrough and got a couple different ones that I hadn’t seen before. This is just yet another mechanic that will ensure that no two Frostpunk playthroughs are the same as there’s just so much variability in them.
For most of the chapters though you’re likely going to be able to keep everyone happy, even if you’re moving the city in a direction that you don’t agree with. I usually found it pretty easy to make promises to pass whatever laws I wanted, with the requests being easy enough to facilitate. Granted this did sometimes force me to make investments in places that didn’t need it, like building additional heat exchanges when the buildings were fine, but it seemed a small price to pay to be able to do whatever I wanted to. I didn’t make use of some of the deeper political mechanics like guided voting or making myself the captain, but I can definitely see the path you’d take if those were something you wanted to do. Suffice to say the political sim part doesn’t feel tacked on, and is a core part of the gameplay loop.
Indeed the whole game has a much better tempo than the original did. I can remember sitting on the fastest game speed for quite a long time in the original, just waiting for things to tick over or for an event to happen to get me to re-engage with the game again. Not so with the sequel; no there’s always going to be something that needs your attention. Even for those precious few times when you can hit the speed up button it’s likely going to be no more than a minute before another event is triggered, causing a small cascade of events that you’ll have to take care of. I definitely appreciate this, it makes the game far more engaging overall, but it also meant that extended sessions did become mentally fatiguing. This didn’t stop me from a couple 3 hour binge sessions though.
From a technical perspective everything runs well, with no game breaking bugs that I encountered. My only complaint is the lack of detail given for certain mechanics, like heat stamps, how long resource transfers take, and a few of the other more nuanced things that aren’t directly explained anywhere. The optional tutorials help, but they’re often lacking in detail for certain things that had me reaching for Reddit threads more often than I’d like. To be sure once you know these things it starts to make more sense and you can address whatever problem you have but it does feel like it’s more effort than it should be.
Frostpunk 2’s narrative will be whatever you make of it, save for a few key events that will ensure a few major things happen to force major narrative choices on you. Whatever choices you end up making though it will be quite compelling, the major choices being incredibly impactful to the way you drive the colony forward. In-between those even the minor choices can have radical implications for how things turn out, not least of which is the hard hitting final screen that you’ll be shown of Lily-May: that child who was born when you started the generator once again. If I’m honest it was probably one of the hardest hitting story points I’ve had in a game as I’d totally forgotten about her but, seeing what she became, the totality of my decisions suddenly had immense weight to them. Honestly bravo 11 Bit Studios, what a way to bring everything home.
Frostpunk 2 is everything you could want from a sequel: taking the core brilliance of the original and supercharging it with more of everything. It’s an excellence piece of craftsmanship, with the visuals and sound track working together to deliver an audiovisual masterpiece. The mechanics, whilst overwhelming at first, are amplified and uplifted versions of the original giving you more of what was good and more new things to keep the game interesting. The narrative keeps true to the original’s format but, again, is grander in scope and optionality ensuring that the path you take will be yours and yours alone. When others would seek to simply put out another game that just did a little more Frostpunk 2 instead reaches for greatness, and achieves it.
Rating: 9.5/10
Frostpunk 2 is available on PC right now for $65.95 and will be available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in 2025. Game was played on the PC with a total of 8.5 hours playtime and 27% of the achievements unlocked. Frostpunk 2 is also available on Xbox Game Pass.
