11 Bit Studios has become reliable since initially jumping onto the scene with Anomaly: Warzone Earth. The outstanding This War of Mine gave them that broader appeal, followed four years later by Frostpunk. The excellent reception of Frostpunk, critically and commercially, with over three million copies sold, meant a sequel was inevitable. This brings us to Frostpunk 2, which will be released later this year and is currently in an open beta.
It felt compact in the original game, as excellent as a city-builder and decision-maker it was. That made sense; you were creating an ever-expanding circle around the generator, and even though you did venture outside of your city bounds, it was limited – understandably limited by the resources 11 Bit Studios had at the time. Frostpunk 2 is looking to expand on every front, and even the 300 weeks (a few times, I may add) hands-on the beta gives you makes this clear, and it’s only a taster.
You could look at Frostpunk 2 as the launchpad from the first game. Your core is up and running, and it’s time to expand outwards. I can’t be sure that this is New London, as the game I was playing had my city surrounded by mountains, but who’s to say that this isn’t New Fort William? For my kilt-wearing haggis friends. The mode is the free-form Utopia Builder, essentially a sandbox. On a basic level, it’s not too dissimilar to the initial game – you’re expanding against the frozen apocalypse, trying to maintain your resources and keep your people alive while maintaining the delicate balance of the needs of the people in your settlement. Only it’s much bigger now.
Food, Shelter, Fuel, Materials and Goods. These are what you’ll be managing in terms of resources. On top of this, you will be passing laws and researching tech on a much grander scale, which becomes the new focus in this sequel. The tech tree is massive, and the preview build barely scratches the surface – particularly since each research has multiple variations for the different factions in your metropolis. Then you have their demands, each wanting to pass laws that suit themselves, undoing ones passed before.
In one of my attempts, I found myself treading old ground multiple times. The two core factions, more moderate, are the Foragers and Machinists. Soon, they will have their more extreme versions, the Ice-bloods and the Technocrats. They’ll be competing on everything, from the type of buildings you add to a sector – will you want a fertility hospital for the Ice-bloods and Foragers or a research hospital for the Technocrats and Machinists? How about family planning? Will you make marriage mandatory, or will you allow people to mix and match? Every decision has multiple implications, and every decision is bound to piss somebody off.
It’s even better when your decisions come back to bite you in the arse when it’s not a faction moaning at you. Your choices will impact the regular person, which will crop up as decisions to be made after an issue has been described to you. One such example for me was making factories very machine-focused. One person got pulled into the machine and shredded to death, but the law I implemented meant machines couldn’t be turned off. My bad. I decided to keep them running, allow machines to be turned off to save lives or repeal the law. Naturally, the machinists wanted me to keep it as is, but I opted for the one where lives could be saved, slightly reducing productivity but saving some lives.
It makes for a delicate balancing act that isn’t too dissimilar to real life’s abysmal state of politics. Factions compete with each other, often – if not always – to society’s detriment, pushing it to its inevitable downfall. The difference here is that you are the one in charge, making far too many promises to keep yourself in power, managing the initial rise and then fighting metaphorical fires to extend your time until the end or until you find whatever mythical deposit (maybe oil will do that?) through exploration.
This exploration takes a similar theme to the original in that you’re sending out teams to points on a map, though this has also been expanded. Your world is more extensive, and you will be sending teams further afield than ever possible before, hoping to find resources – animals grazing, old silos, mines, and more. Sometimes, you can create outposts, letting you ship these resources back to your city – and this will be essential as your city cannot sustain itself with the small amount of land on offer. To facilitate this, you can lay tracks to speed up movement and even research heated railroads, making me think of Snowpiercer.
It all makes for the same Frostpunk I first enjoyed, but on the promise of a grander scale. Are the first three hundred weeks of the beta the best of the game? We don’t know at this stage, but I want to believe it gets even better as you explore further, research more, and expand your reach. Time will tell.
The current beta has a few endings to explore; the first I found was finding the oil colony by going further and further out in the frostland – and it makes it clear that this is only the beginning of what would be a long-running Utopia Builder game. The depth of Frostpunk 2 is apparent already, and I’m looking forward to playing more of it. Frostpunk 2 is set to launch on the 25th of July this year. Until then, look at our Q&A session with the developers from last year.
