Frostpunk 2 Review (Console) – Death Is Part of the Process

Frostpunk was one of those games that was worth the effort to learn and progress in, even if it was hard to do so. A management sim built on making the best choice in a sea of bad choices, it was a game that spent a lot of time on my console, though even now I question if I was ever really good at it, or if the game just nails the feeling of making you feel horrible after every choice you make. Maybe I will never have my answer to that, but I know Frostpunk 2 is, in the best of terms, more of that. In fairness, some issues, like the game’s learning curve, do return, which can be a shame, given that many of the best bits require dedication to get past the punishing winters the early game brings, but once you get there, it’s hard to regret your decision to keep with it.

While Frostpunk 2 has a story mode, in fairness, it serves as a tutorial for the more open-ended Utopia Builder option. This mode allows players to pick between a large number of maps, with several quantifiers, to create their own experience of a community trying to survive the endless winter. In both that mode and the story mode, players take the role of the leader of the community known as the Steward, who has to balance severely limited resources, the politics of the city, and the brutal cold, to ensure their survival. Doing so is far harder than you think, and even the game informs you at the beginning that failure is part of the process. Where other management sims might give you safety nets near the lower end of failure, to keep you from complete collapse, Frostpunk 2 is pretty easy to destroy all your progress with one bad choice.

The story mode itself features multiple chapters that are loosely connected by completing tasks. If one is aware of how to succeed in these tasks, you are likely to breeze through the story, as most chapters require only the completion of one or two things, even if the full management is available to you. The second chapter, for instance, requires finding an area with oil and mining it, then sending that oil back to your main city for more fuel. Completing this advances the chapter. The issue here is that the game has a lot of tutorials. They can be very confusing, so, in my case, I ended up going weeks, right to the point my city was about to mutiny if I didn’t complete the task, before figuring out I didn’t set up my transfer properly. I only needed to adjust the gauge slightly to fix it. And there are a lot of times you might find yourself in that situation.

Compounding this issue is the console controller setup, which can be annoying to navigate the tools you have. I always find it weird sims like this do not use a full mouse setup, which is similar to other games like The Wandering Village or Two Point Museum. In order to access the top or bottom menus, you need to hit the square on the PlayStation to access a menu where you can push up or down to access. From there, the controls are a bit clunky as you will usually need to cycle through multiple options to find the one you want. The lower menu allows you to interact with factions directly to improve trust, so you will be accessing this menu a lot, making the process less and less fun the more you do so. This and other menus can also not load properly, requiring you to back in and out of them multiple times before they actually let you navigate, in particular, the research menu you unlock later on.

Despite this, the game is incredibly fun, or at least as fun as a game that constantly judges you can be. The biggest thing that you, as the steward, need to tackle is inventory management, which can again get a little hard. Backing yourself into a corner can be hard to navigate out of because most of the things you need to check are buried in the aforementioned menus, with the navigation making it slightly of a struggle to actually locate them properly. Once you do so, building out your city, breaking through the ice to build new extraction buildings or food processors, becomes an intricate dance as you attempt to manage these resources to grow. In all of these, heat becomes the scarcest resource as you try to keep all the areas you build well-heated.

What makes this even more engaging is how dynamic the narrative is based on how you are playing. Citizens will get stories that play into larger issues around your city. One instance of this came as I overbuilt extraction points for materials and tapped out my heater. A cold season came, and I was given an option on how to handle it: lower the number of staff on shift or equip our people with protective gear so they could handle the cold. Other issues, like sickness, which in a freezing hellscape is expected, are handled through a council made up of the multiple factions that all have wants and desires. To pass a law, such as creating a quarantine, I had to barter with multiple factions to get the votes, adding additional tasks I needed to complete to keep promises at the risk of losing trust with the factions, which is the fastest way to get voted out of power.

Thankfully, and especially in a punishing game like this, Frostpunk 2 has a robust system of improvements you can unlock to improve the conditions of your society, such as add-ons for coal mines or improvements for housing to make them hotter even when you have no heat to offer. Every one of these improvements feels impactful to your journey, which I was not expecting; however, there is still a challenge in implementation, making the reward feel on brand. Soon, it will become necessary to explore far beyond your initial city, possibly even building additional ones like the one I had to build to transport that oil. These levels feel even more impactful when you can leave to focus on something else, since the game does not stop even if you are not there to see it.

All of these are already in a sleek package, with the graphics and design of the buildings and space vastly improved over its predecessor. While much of the experience feels similar, Frostpunk 2 does not do much to reinvent a wheel I don’t think anybody wants it to, even building feels like leaps and bounds above what came before. There are some framerate dips on the PlayStation 5 version of the game, and I’ve played it on a PS5 Pro. These dips do not detract from the experience, but they become noticeable from time to time. There is also the grandiose orchestral soundtrack composed by Piotr Musiał that helps frame the struggle of life and death, but still frames the slow nature of growth. The new highest praise I can give a soundtrack on my PlayStation 5 is that I turned the volume up on my portal multiple times so I could listen to it even when I was watching TV. It was definitely enjoyable.

Verdict

Frostpunk 2 is, for the most part, the same great experience that was released on PC last year. A city-building management sim based around the worst possible choices that, in a normal society, we might frown on, but in one where you are one day away from death, it might just be the best choice. Do you bury your dead or burn them for fuel? Do you train the children to be part of the workforce, or allow them to just be kids, even when your workforce is dwindling and the resources are too? Every decision has weight, and every choice has value, which keeps you coming back to make bad decisions. Unfortunately, the biggest issues I had were console problems, with hard-to-navigate menus that require too many steps, and several menus leading to either glitched interfaces or bugs that you need to fix by bouncing out of the menus multiple times. There are also framerate issues, even on the Pro, which can become noticeable at times. Growing your Frostpunk 2 city remains more enjoyable than the sum of all its parts, and I will still be here, leading my people to ruin.

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