Now Playing: Frostpunk

I’d seen Frostpunk go on sale numerous times on Steam but I was always wary of picking it up. When it comes to city building / management type games, my enjoyment of them tends to be very hit or miss. I either really get stuck into it, or I get bored very quickly. But then I noticed Frostpunk was being given away for free on the Epic store and you can’t exactly go wrong at that price.

I can’t say I really use my Epic account for more than claiming free games that I never actually play, but Frostpunk proved to be different. I really got stuck into it, clocking more than twenty hours over just a few days.

Frostpunk is a city building sim with a focus on survival. There are four scenarios included in the base edition (obviously, the free version doesn’t include the DLC) each with their own unique objectives, but the ultimate goal for each is largely the same – to build your city and keep your inhabitants alive as the winter storms grow progressively worse and the temperature plummets.

The setting – an historically alternate, steampunk Victorian style era – fits perfectly with the mood. It reminds me, thematically, a lot of Homeworld – the sense of desperation, of being the last survivors on a journey to a new home. Each scenario has one or more narrative event chains in addition to various gameplay related events depending upon your actions or your choice of ‘Laws’.

 

There are three branches of Law in the game – a base set and the choice between an ‘Order’ or a ‘Faith’ set. You can pass new Laws periodically and each, regardless of set, will offer various choices as to how you want to manage and build your society, unlocking new options or building types.

Your city starts small, your citizens huddled around a defunct generator. As you progress and expand you can put your citizens to work gathering resources – coal, wood, iron and food. You’ll slowly build up and out, always aware that the more you expand, the more you need to heat as the temperature continues to drop. You can send scouts into the frozen wastelands to search for supplies or other survivors to join your city.

But more people mean more mouths to feed and homes to build and heat. Which means more coal to keep the generator running. You can research new technology allowing you to improve building insulation, or upgrade existing resource structures to improve their output. You can upgrade the generator, expanding its heat output and its reach. You can find or construct towering automatons which can operate various structures regardless of the cold.

Your citizens are governed by their ‘Hope’ and ‘Discontent’ – and you may need to make hard choices or pass oppressive Laws that they won’t exactly be happy with in order to keep them alive. The goal of the ‘main’ scenario is to survive a super storm which means stockpiling enough supplies to see your people through safely.

 

Which I guess kind of leads me into my first real criticism of Frostpunk. Those early attempts to survive are extremely fun. The game doesn’t have the best tutorial system so there’s a fair amount of trial and error involved as you figure out the best way to approach your objective. The problem is, when you do figure out the best way to build and expand and how to prepare for the coming storm, Frostpunk does become a little too easy to play.

To be fair, there are multiple difficulty settings to test your ability, but even so, the manner in which you build and expand won’t really change, not when you understand which path to take in regard to Laws or technology that are the most efficient and effective ways to go. This wouldn’t be such an issue if the other three scenarios required you to take a different approach and play in a different kind of way.

And they do, to a degree, but Frostpunk was clearly designed around that first, main scenario, and the other three are kind of short and certain aspects of the game – like the Laws – don’t necessarily fit neatly within them. They’re fun, but they’re certainly not as involved or fleshed out as the main scenario, which is a shame.

 
Beyond the scenarios there is also an ‘Endless’ mode in which you can just focus on building up your city without any final objective. Fun, for a time, with a choice of different maps to play on, but as you’d expect, once you hit a point where your city is pretty much entirely safe and secure, there’s not a lot else to do.

Overall, Frostpunk is a really enjoyable city building game with a unique twist. The visuals and the music fit the gloomy mood. There’s a good sense of progression and there is a decent amount of replay value thanks to the Laws, scenarios and difficulty options – which you can customise entirely to your liking.

But Frostpunk is also kind of limited. The game was clearly designed around the main scenario and everything else feels kind of stuck rigidly around that, and not in a way that entirely works. It’s like a small game trying to be bigger and more expansive than the mechanics really allow.

Frostpunk must have been successful enough to support this additional free and paid content, but it does feel like they stretched Frostpunk’s mechanics and gameplay systems as far as they can go. Which is why I’m eager to see what they do next, if they can take what they’ve done with Frostpunk and push it bigger and better.

7/10 (Updated Score - 8/10 - Complete Edition)