Most sequels stick to a safe formula, refining what came before without taking big risks. Frostpunk 2, however, breaks that mold. While it stays true to the brutal, frozen wasteland setting of the original, it reinvents nearly everything about how you build and manage your city. The mechanics for constructing buildings, gathering resources, and keeping your people warm have been completely overhauled, and the introduction of a political system makes governing the people of New London feel like a constant negotiation. The trade-off? A loss of some of the personal, street-level detail that gave the first game its emotional impact. Even so, the tough moral choices and intense survival challenges remain at the heart of the experience.
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A World of Ice and Politics
The bleak atmosphere is as strong as ever, thanks to howling blizzards and a dramatic soundtrack that rises with the tension in your city. Coming straight from a replay of the first game, the lack of visible citizens walking the streets took some getting used to. Still, they aren’t completely absent—pop-up dialogue and a loudspeaker announcer give the sense that your decisions have an impact on real people. The icy map is naturally a sea of white, but terrain features like cliffs and mountains help keep it visually interesting. As your city grows, the addition of detailed districts and glowing power lines adds color and life to the world.
The five-chapter Story mode acts as an introduction to the more open-ended Utopia Builder mode, though outside of a few short cutscenes, there’s not a lot of narrative driving it. It mostly serves as a bridge between the events of the first game and this one, with much of the storytelling coming from smaller, emotionally charged moments about life in the frozen world. The city-building mechanics revolve around placing and expanding large, multi-tile districts—each with its own specialized structures—while carefully managing adjacency bonuses and upgrades.
Building a Frozen Future
Frostpunk 2’s city-building mechanics introduce some new challenges, not all of which feel entirely necessary. One of the more frustrating aspects is the frostbreaking system, which requires you to manually clear out areas before construction can begin. It makes sense in the world’s fiction, but in practice, it feels like busywork that slows down expansion. Similarly, if you need to adjust a single misplaced building tile, you’ll have to demolish the entire district and start over. At least the game refunds all spent resources, so it’s more of an inconvenience than a punishment.
Expanding beyond your city, the Frostlands map offers a larger and more developed version of the exploration system from the first game. Instead of simply sending scouts to investigate locations, you must build roads to secure a steady flow of resources, establish and upgrade outposts, and even found satellite colonies to keep your main city running. It’s a secondary task, but an essential one—without it, your economy will grind to a halt.
That said, managing both the city and the Frostlands map isn’t as smooth as it should be. When you’re away from your city, you lose access to faction information, making it easy to miss rising tensions until it’s too late. Also, the map’s size makes it frustratingly difficult to quickly locate scouts after completing a mission. A more zoomed-out perspective would’ve helped significantly.
Overproduction or Death
Keeping the generator fueled and ensuring a steady supply of heat, food, and materials is familiar territory for survival strategy fans, but Frostpunk 2 introduces new layers of complexity. One of the biggest threats comes from Whiteout storms, which periodically shut down all Frostland operations, cutting off supply chains for months at a time. This forces you to overproduce resources rather than simply meeting daily needs—if you don’t stockpile aggressively, your people will freeze to death in the hundreds.
A few bugs pop up here and there, like UI buttons overlapping or dialogue choices not registering on the first click. Autosaves also cause brief freezes, which can be annoying but don’t break the experience. And as expected in a game like this, performance starts to dip when your population grows into the tens of thousands.
Politics and Power Struggles
The real heart of Frostpunk 2 lies in its faction and government systems. Instead of outright losing the game when your city collapses, your downfall comes from losing public trust or letting tensions rise to the point of political upheaval. Balancing the demands of different factions is a constant struggle, and if any resource shortage spirals out of control, public unrest can lead to complete societal collapse.
On my first playthrough, I made the rookie mistake of ignoring a faction entirely, assuming I could keep the others happy enough to stay in power. That worked for a while—until I needed their support to pass a crucial law. Researching new technologies is easy enough, but passing laws requires approval from a Council, which consists of representatives from each faction. Voting plays out in a visually engaging way, with council seats lighting up as votes are cast, and every decision feels like a political gamble.
Bribery—sorry, persuasion—is the main way to secure votes. Most factions will support laws that align with their ideology, but sometimes, they’ll settle for a good old-fashioned cash payment (ironically called heatstamps). However, if a proposal directly contradicts a faction’s core beliefs, there’s no amount of persuasion that will sway them. Some votes are true nail-biters.
One of the most enjoyable aspects of the political system is how you can sometimes manipulate factions into supporting what you were already planning. The research menu even highlights which faction supports which upgrade, allowing you to preemptively promise it to them in exchange for goodwill. Similarly, there’s something deeply satisfying about tricking an annoying faction into believing they’ll have the final say on a new law—only to whip enough votes to shut them down completely.
Of course, pushing controversial policies can have serious consequences. If you don’t have the right tools to suppress unrest, protests can bring production to a halt, injure citizens, and even destroy equipment. As your government becomes more authoritarian, harsher options become available—like exiling entire groups or leaving them to freeze in makeshift outdoor prisons. I ultimately won my first campaign by deporting a particularly troublesome faction to their own isolated colony. Not the most ethical solution, but hey, it worked.
Surviving the Storm
My initial playthrough of Story mode lasted around 15 hours, including a restart after realizing how badly I had mismanaged my early choices. Since then, I’ve spent another 20 hours in Utopia Builder mode, tackling objectives like expanding multiple colonies to 10,000 residents or pushing my central city to a population of 50,000. With six major factions, their radical offshoots, seven Frostland maps, and different ideological paths to pursue, there’s plenty of replay value here. Higher difficulty settings also demand a deeper understanding of faction politics and resource management, making each playthrough feel fresh.
That said, Frostpunk 2 does lose something in its shift to a bigger-picture perspective. The original game’s smaller scale made its moral dilemmas feel personal—every name in the graveyard was someone you could recognize. Here, when a notification pops up saying 93 children died in a mine collapse, it vanishes quickly, without a meaningful emotional impact. The game is simply too large to create the same sense of connection.
Speaking of that mine collapse… yes, that was my fault. I had opted for an apprenticeship system over mandatory schooling, allowing children to work in mines for increased efficiency. The alternative was using explosives to clear the path, but that would’ve yielded less coal. It seemed like a logical decision at the time—until disaster struck. Frostpunk 2 constantly forces these kinds of tough choices, and while they don’t always carry the same emotional weight as before, they still add up.
Verdict
Frostpunk 2 is a bold reinvention rather than a simple evolution. While it sacrifices some of the original’s intimate storytelling in favor of a broader, more systemic approach, the addition of deep faction politics and expanded city-building mechanics ensures that no two playthroughs feel the same. Juggling competing interests while braving the relentless cold is a rewarding challenge, and the morally gray choices will keep you questioning your leadership long after you step away. It may not hit quite as hard emotionally, but as a strategy game, it’s as gripping as ever.
