Frostpunk 2

Steam Reviews

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• Not recommended Posted September 6, 2025 on Steam I could write entire essays on why the original game is superb, why it replays well and why it felt personal to try and keep people alive and treat them as humans, why moral choices had weight and gave being an overseer a sense of responsibility, I am truly a fan of Frostpunk it's easily in my top 10 games of all time to date. Frostpunk 2 kinda killed all that right out of the gate, I was pumped for a sequel and tracked it for years, pre ordering it (which I never normally do). I felt like I could trust 11bit studios to deliver, especially given other amazing games like TWOM which is also probably in my top 10 games of all time. Sadly I just don't like this game at all, it's a new direction on the original IP and maybe you justify that because you want to stay as fresh as possible, but you lose the heart of what Frostpunk was and what made it so great. I tried the beta that came with pre-ordering and immediately felt this disappointment, but trying to play it again after launch was no better. Icebreaking, why!? Seems like completely pointless busywork that's done to create an arbitrary resource sink, there is barely any actual visual feedback of it either, it literally seems like a pointless waste of time. Scale. OK scale has increased, more people, more cities. But then you get your first popup that 40 people froze to death overnight. No real feedback that people weren't getting back to their homes in time to avoid the cold, or that heating wasn't sufficient in a specific area. Cities scale from these complex sprawling things in FP1 to the simplest of building nodes in FP2. You aren't saving people anymore, you balancing statistics. Moral decisions have weight only when you actually care or have some personal attachment to the city, in FP1 that's done very well, every citizen is a practical worker (or a burden) so you really care about them, it feels more personal. In FP2 if 40 people can die in a fleeting moment, then policy decisions in the city just feel like you're balancing numbers on a spreadsheet. And it doesn't really tie into how you play the game, in FP1 if workers were too cold and had limbs freezing off, you'd be motivated to intervene and heat workplaces, or re-jig your city to have a more sensible layout. The animations are pleh, they're designed to represent many more people doing a task to accommodate the new scale, moving people become blurs, they become these ethereal animations that fade in and out at locations as you need them, they don't have a sense of physicality like they had to walk to a location, they just sort of appear, fade in and fade away after. It's just visually unappealing and impersonal. The new resources to manage to me were always a bit confusing they don't feel well explained, even in the tutorial it's obvious that a mismanagement of resources trying to acquire a new source can lead to catch-22 like situations largely what feels due to the necessity to ice break tiles to expand. I find myself finally ice breaking to a food resource and suddenly not having the resource to build a place to gather food. It's like they invented a crap version of Civ6, used the Frostpunk IP to bootstrap its popularity, but betray everything that made the original so great. I do not recommend this game. If you like Frostpunk it'll be hit or miss if you like this. If you're new the Frostpunk lore and want this kind of city builder, just go and buy Civ6, it's like 300x more refined. If what draws you is the brutal survival nature of the winter/cold and the aesthetic and feeling choices have consequences, then forget this and buy the original. 50 citizens froze to death while you read this review.
• Recommended Posted December 28, 2025 on Steam I don't get all the people wanting Frostpunk 1 again lmao. The devs pretty much said it to our faces with how they presented the game that this is NOT the same as Frostpunk 1. This is meant to be larger in scope and different in problems. People complaining about the political system missed the point that FP2 is literally ABOUT the politics. The politics are quite literally meant to be the greatest challenge in the game, and it's the politics that are meant to roadblock you. That's why the Captain's Authority lets you axe the bureaucracy and just ignore what people want. It's supposed to be the point where you stop choosing to listen and simply start commanding. That's why it's one of the proverbial lines you can cross in this game. Are you good enough at managing politics to prevent needing to go Totalitarian on your population or not? The point is not whether you can survive anymore. That was the premise of FP1. The point is whether you can not only hold everything together once people aren't quite as desperate anymore. Once human nature starts to re-emerge and people start bickering and factionalizing. You can literally see this in the blurbs for the respective games. FP1: "The City Must Survive" as opposed to FP2: "The City Must Not Fall". That change in wording is deliberate, because it's not a question of external survival anymore - it's a question of internal cohesion at a period where things are starting to get easier, but not quite easy enough that survival is guaranteed.
• Recommended Posted June 10, 2025 on Steam The overall experience of the game is completely different from Frostpunk 1. And that is where opinions will change. Frostpunk 1 offered a personal and individualistic approach to the city. Every person's demise felt like a tragedy. Like a village of friends and family that you try to protect from the bitterness of frost. Frostpunk 2, takes on a new approach. Instead of trying to keep the city alive, you're tasked with keeping the city from tearing itself apart. Thousands upon thousands of people, all with their own dreams, hopes and opinions. The death, turns from tragedy into statistic. The mentality of each player is what will define their opinions and reviews over this game. I say, give this game a try with a new mindset. it is not Frostpunk 1 and it is not going to play as one. While the fundamentals are there, the focus is shifted from the glory of the generator, to the squabbling of your fellow inhabitants of the city. When venturing into the wild was once considered extremely dangerous, now it is incentive in other to expand. Frostpunk 1 taught players how to survive. Frostpunk 2 will teach them how to thrive.
• Recommended Posted August 24, 2025 on Steam It's okay. Polished, good vibes. Boring gameplay. This game has nothing on FP1. Saw somewhere that the devs said about this relative flop "singleplayer is dead" It's not, you just didn't make a game that was as good as the first one.
• Recommended Posted November 2, 2025 on Steam [b]Frostpunk 2.[/b] I read the reviews and almost didn’t buy it. With all the complaints, I expected a disaster. I’m glad I ignored them. [b]Do NOT expect a “better Frostpunk 1.”[/b] This is important. This is a [i]new[/i] game with a completely different loop, structure, and goal. It’s set long after the first game — not about surviving a blizzard, but managing a fractured society of thousands after the storm. It’s about ideology, conflict, and trying to hold a city together as communities clash and the future refuses to cooperate. Less micromanaging heat vents — more steering a civilization on the edge.
• Not recommended Posted December 31, 2025 on Steam I really, really wanted to like Frostpunk 2. “A wider, bigger Frostpunk 1” sounded great, even if it wasn’t trying to be the same game. And it doesn’t have to be. The problem is that in chasing “bigger and better,” it feels like the high-detail focus that made Frostpunk 1 hit got lost. You’re much more zoomed out this time. That alone wouldn’t bother me — I know plenty of people complained about the close-up focus in the first game — but the zoom-out only works if the increased scope comes with something else to replace that intimacy. More atmosphere. More personality. More visual identity. More “place.” Instead, it feels strangely dead. The city doesn’t feel like it’s responding to the world in a meaningful way. Snow doesn’t really melt as temperatures rise. Districts look bland and interchangeable, and the only big visual change I consistently noticed was… how much snow piled onto them. For a game about survival and climate brutality, that lack of tactile feedback is a huge miss. In Frostpunk 1, even when you weren’t actively doing something, the city itself was constantly telling you a story. Here it often feels like I’m expanding a set of systems, not building a living settlement. I wanted the bigger scope. I wanted the politics and the logistics and the “society simulator” angle. But without the attention to detail and the emotional texture, the whole thing ends up feeling like it’s missing the soul that made Frostpunk special in the first place. The factions are mostly uninteresting save for a few. A lot of the time it doesn’t feel like I’m choosing a worldview — it feels like I’m choosing which buff/debuff package I want to manage. And that’s a shame, because Frostpunk 1’s big split (Order vs Faith) didn’t just change numbers, it changed the tone of your city. The laws had bite, and the city visually reflected your choices in a way that was hard to miss. Here, even when systems like Utopia Builder try to add identity (Utopia points, milestones, etc.), it still tends to slide into power creep. Once you understand the economy and the social systems, it’s surprisingly easy to stack Trust, keep tension low, and cruise. The political layer becomes something you “solve,” not something that keeps its teeth. And that feeds into the biggest issue: you rarely get those big, satisfying moments where your policy decisions visibly reshape the city. In Frostpunk 1 you could feel your ideology getting bolted onto the streets — watchtowers, spotlights, propaganda, shrines — little details that made the city look like it belonged to the choices you made. In Frostpunk 2, I kept waiting for that “oh wow, we’ve become that kind of society” transformation… and it just never really arrived. What surprised me is how much that bothered me, because on paper it’s “just flavor.” But flavor is basically what Frostpunk 1 excelled at. It wasn’t the deepest city builder in the world — it was a survival mood piece with hard choices and incredible presentation. Frostpunk 2 feels like it added more systems and more scope, but somehow lost the thing that made the series special: the oppressive atmosphere, the immediacy, and the sense that your city was a character. I don’t hate it. I’m just disappointed, because it feels like the foundation for something great, but the game rarely delivers the emotional payoff that made the first one unforgettable. Now - that's my opinion on the biggest problem - the other problem, is the actual content and building systems. Tabbing between settlements feels clunky and slow. Too many clicks for basic management, and a lot of standard city-builder quality-of-life is missing. Placing multiple buildings means reopening the same menus over and over, and you can’t cleanly replace one building with another. If you commit to something like Moss Ventilation early, then later pivot hard into a different direction, you end up manually ripping out and rebuilding instead of upgrading/sidegrading. To be fair, I didn’t go hunting for hotkeys — but I’m used to modern UI polish in this genre, and here it just felt annoying. Then there’s Squalor and Disease. Disease is trivial to manage once you understand it, and Squalor is basically a nothingburger if you stay on top of building. Guard squads barely feel like a real system because they mostly exist to do one job (stop riots/civil wars and suppress crime), and crime often doesn’t even matter if you’re doing well on Goods anyway. The late game also collapses into a very repetitive loop. Nine times out of ten you hit ~60k population and you just… run out of meaningful jobs. You’re already working the important resource chains, so extra workforce stops mattering. The “build” loop becomes infinite housing (maybe another factory), while the map layer pushes you into colonies because there are so few end-game-relevant resources at home. Progress and Adaptation end up playing surprisingly similarly outside of a handful of laws — you go wide either way, because you’re basically forced to. I honestly think Progress should have had a “build tall” identity — something like an extra district expansion tier that turns housing into actual high-rises and makes the city feel dense, vertical, and engineered. Adaptation could be the ideology that spreads out through colonies and hardy sprawl, while Progress invests in vertical megacity upgrades. Right now both paths often converge on the same practical solution, and the game doesn’t deliver the visual or mechanical payoff that would make those ideologies feel transformative. That’s why the whole thing leaves me with the same impression: missing potential. They made deliberate choices that gutted the series’ strengths. They zoomed out, abstracted the city into districts, and traded lived-in atmosphere for spreadsheets — and then didn’t replace that intimacy with anything equally compelling. It's so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ irritating. And the “politics” pillar they marketed so hard is mostly shallow. Factions rarely feel like ideologies that transform your city — they feel like loadouts. You pick a set of modifiers, manage the meter, and move on. Once you understand the loops, tension and trust stop being drama and start being maintenance. That’s not compelling governance, it’s routine. At the end of the day, Frostpunk 2 doesn’t commit hard enough to be a deep management game, and it’s not satisfying enough as a builder to carry itself on creativity or spectacle. It ends up feeling like a sequel made by an off-team that knew what the brand was, but just half-assed it.