Frostpunk 2

New London is back and more zoomed out than ever. Familiar ideas are back: Brave the cold and make hard choices to keep everyone alive…and in line. But everything's bigger this time,. More locations, a broader focus, and building something like a small nation-state versus a city in the original. – I played with a controller and while some interactions that are annoying (more on that below), for the most part everything was thoughtfully laid out and totally workable. It’s nice to not have to use a mouse and keyboard for a strategy game. That said, there is sadly a lot of UI cruft that was better in the prior game. For example, take heating hubs. They’re not needed most of the time and consume a lot of resources. In the original game, you could toggle them on or off easily from a single view. But in this game, that’s not possible. You have to zoom in on the tiny heat hub, interact with it, which opens up the detail screen, and *then* you can disable it. It’s a lot of steps just to toggle off something that you could do en masse from one screen in FP1. I don’t like seeing that regression. – The story is starts great, but ends poorly (a tale as old as time). As before, it drives you to make difficult choices and shows you the aftermath of those decisions. I didn’t love the finale. To me, it feels like it just sort of ends. I get not wanting to rehash Frostpunk 1’s epic finale, but, like, the frost is what I’m here for. [spoiler]Instead of an epic stand against the frost, the final chapter is a…civil war? Sorry Frostpunk, but other games do war better. Do what you do best. Give me a mega blizzard as the finale instead, please.[/spoiler] The city builder and strategy side of the game feels board game-like. It’s light, and thankfully the UI clunkiness isn’t that big of a deal because unlike, say, Civilization, you’re not going to be filling the whole map up by any stretch of the imagination. Certain mechanics like soldiers and fighting are especially undercooked especially given how important they are narratively. While the strategy side of the game isn’t super crunchy or anything, for me, that’s not a problem. I’m here for the story and the vibes and the theming, and all of that stuff is good. – I enjoyed this game’s broader scope. Zooming out for the first time and realizing I could colonize the whole frostland if I wanted made me smile. The law, parliament and faction systems are neat. And the music, art, and just the vibes are just *so* good. After seeing several other city-builder/story games come and go leaving me super disappointed, it’s nice to see Frostpunk back and making this look easy. While I was interested enough to play through the main story, I can’t say I’m interested in chasing achievements or even playing DLC (as they don’t extend the core story), or going after endless mode. For me, the mechanics by themselves aren’t quite interesting enough to dive in for more. And for a game called Frostpunk, the cold takes a back seat this time, to my disappointment. Narrowly recommended, for those interested in Frostpunk's world and open to a story-heavy district-builder game.