Now Playing: The Last Autumn & On The Edge (DLC)

I really did enjoy playing Frostpunk when I claimed a free copy through the Epic Store earlier this year. In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I decided to pick up the complete edition when it went on sale recently on Steam. If you’ve read my original review you’ll know that, despite liking the main A New Home scenario, I felt the following scenarios – The Arks, The Refugees and The Fall of Winterhome – stretched the gameplay mechanics to the limit.

I said that – ‘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.’

Of the additional scenarios, The Fall of Winterhome is by far the most interesting to play, but it does still rely upon the same mechanics and system of progression that you’re already very familiar with. So I was very curious about the two paid DLC scenarios – The Last Autumn and On The Edge. Do they provide a new twist on the Frostpunk formula, or are they just more of the same?

The Last Autumn serves as a prequel to the New Home scenario. Set before the Great Frost, you’re tasked with building a generator that will one day be used to support a city. Initially, the cold isn’t a concern, although the temperature does drop dramatically during the latter stages of the scenario. So it’s not heat that you need to manage in order to progress and survive – but safety.

Yes, safety. You’re essentially a workplace safety officer trying to build the generator before the Great Frost arrives but in a way that doesn’t kill half your workers. Well . . . that’s actually up to you. You can endanger your workers if you like, exposing them to the risks of fire, structural collapse and toxic gas all so you can build the generator faster, or . . .

You can invest in safety equipment, construct ventilators to improve air quality and sign laws to enable shorter working shifts so your people aren’t pushed quite so hard. It is, of course, a balancing act. You have a limited time to construct the generator and ‘acceptable losses’ may be required to get the job done.

But here’s where this scenario gets more interesting – your workers and your engineers will have their own opinion on how to proceed and how valuable they are to the project. Workers might go on strike, forcing you to negotiate with them, offering them increased rations or even a day off. Of course, you can just crack down on them hard and start executing one every day until they learn their lesson and get back to work.

Like the New Home scenario, The Last Autumn is all about making hard choices in order to survive. It’s about putting you in a position where there aren’t always clearly right or wrong decisions. There’s new technologies to research, new buildings to construct, new laws to pass and a new map to explore.

And then we have On The Edge which serves as a sequel scenario to A New Home. You’ve been sent to set up an outpost at an old military facility in order to transfer resources (steel and steam cores) back to New London. But New London begins to make increasingly unpopular demands of you and your people so you decide to go it alone.

The problem is, you have no generator, no source of food and only a limited source of wood. And this is where the new settlements system comes into play. By sending out scouts and construction teams you can contact and build trading outposts within three other settlements, each of which are willing to provide you with coal, wood, workers and raw food.

These resources don’t come for free as each settlement has its own needs and a list of ‘upgrades’ you can help them construct in order to increase their output. Eventually, you’ll build a ‘safe’ route between your outpost and theirs, enabling them to send a regular shipment of their primary resource.

Eventually, New London contacts you asking for your help and you can either choose to save them – with the help of your new allies – or to let them fall. If your allies do help it will be dependent upon how ‘loyal’ they are to you – in other words, how much you’ve invested in upgrading their camps.

This all might sound like quite a new way to play but I can’t say it’s actually very interesting. Once you’ve got trade established, it’s really just a game of transferring one resource from one settlement to another based upon what you and they need. Your own settlement won’t really expand or evolve much because . . . it doesn’t really need to. It also physically can’t because of how limited the play area is – you’re literally On The Edge of a cliff.

Aside from the settlement stuff which is pretty limited and simple, there’s not really anything new in On The Edge and it’s probably not something you’ll play more than once or twice. Out of these two paid scenarios, The Last Autumn is easily the more engaging to play although it does unfortunately suffer from the same problem A New Home does.

Like A New Home, The Last Autumn plays out more like a puzzle that you need to solve. It’s fun as you figure things out and the game throws unexpected challenges at you, but once you’ve gone through it once, there’s not really any more surprises. You know what to do and how to do it and it’s really just a matter of finding a more efficient way of doing things.

Overall, I’m glad I picked up this complete version of Frostpunk. The extra scenarios, whilst not amazing, are still a good addition and provide their own unique variations on the core mechanics. I think if you’ve played the base game, they’re certainly worth getting on sale. And if you don’t already own Frostpunk, I’d certainly recommend picking up the complete version. There’s plenty here to keep you busy.

The Last Autumn – 7/10 On The Edge – 5/10