Frostpunk 2 is a survival strategy city-builder game developed and published by 11 bit Studios. The game comes with two modes: a story mode, featuring a campaign split into six different chapters, and the ‘utopia’ mode, which features a sandbox with endless play. It’s a sequel to Frostpunk, which originally came out in 2018, and is set in the same harsh frozen wastelands where humans are struggling to survive.

The events of Frostpunk 2 take place at the beginning of the twentieth century and only about thirty years after the story of the original Frostpunk. The city that survivors have painstakingly built up in the bitter cold – known as New London – is in trouble once again; the city is overcrowded, running low on resources, and the city’s captain has died. As the city’s steward, it’s your job to assuage citizens’ concerns and unite an increasingly divided group of people to get the city back on its feet. All of this is important for one reason only: to survive.

Since the original Frostpunk was released, the team of developers behind the title has grown significantly, with a team of about seventy developers now working on Frostpunk 2. When Frostpunk 2 was originally announced, the game’s co-director, Jakub Stokalski, spoke about the team’s desire to focus more on the game’s production, scale, and UX, in order to deliver a unique experience where players had a wide array of choices available to them. He also warned that players would, however, also be reaping the consequences of any big choices they make in-game.

When it comes to Frostpunk 2, the development team growth certainly shows. For starters, the game’s visuals are eye-catching straight off the bat, from the game’s opening cinematic sequence down to the individual tiles and buildings on your game’s map – everything looks highly realistic and beautifully detailed. Gameplay-wise, there’s a lot to keep track of, practically, to ensure your citizens are fed, healthy, and fit enough to work. Like in the original Frostpunk, food, shelter, and heat are all still crucial factors to keep your city running, but Frostpunk 2 also comes with new gameplay features that speak to the complexity of New London thirty years later.

For one thing, the city’s population has grown significantly, which isn’t an easy feat in Frostpunk’s harsh and unforgiving world. The scale on which you’re now operating as the city’s steward, given the population’s growth, is reflected in the game’s map size and its new districts feature. Rather than placing individual buildings on your map, Frostpunk 2 is centered on building districts with specific purposes – food extraction, resource extraction, housing, and so on – and then placing individual buildings within each district. You’ll also need to be conscious of placing districts strategically, and how much energy and heat each one will gobble up; many districts will have to be placed on specific tiles with specific resources, similar to titles like Civilization or Age of Wonders. But be warned: nothing in Frostpunk 2 comes easily when it comes to resources, energy, fuel, or food, and it’s clear that the developers have thought about integrating the feel of Frostpunk’s brutal world into every part of the game. In this sense, the city-builder is not for the faint of heart. In contrast to the original Frostpunk, for example, where you’d be keeping an eye on the time of day, chapters in the story mode will now unabashedly include a counter in the corner of your screen indicating how many weeks you’ve managed to stockpile food for before your citizens will starve to death. Or when you’re ready to place a building on your map, you’ll have to frostbreak the icy ground first before being able to build on it, which will cost you time, energy, and precious resources known as ‘scraps’, which are collected from citizens on a weekly basis. If you run short on scraps, you can choose to collect them from citizens by force, but this, in turn, may impact your standing as a steward, and have disastrous consequences down the track.

Impressively, every action, however small, will have an impact – be it good or bad. Place an industrial district next to a housing one? Your people will get sick more easily. Run out of oil to keep your people warm? Then you can overheat your generator, but risk people dying trying to keep it running. Force your people to do overtime to keep everyone fed? The workers may get sick, die, or revolt. These choices become even more pronounced when you factor in ‘whiteouts’ – huge storms that can disrupt your production lines significantly. When these hit, often all you can do is rely on your food reserves stockpiled throughout a playthrough. Haven’t had the chance to produce enough? It may be lights out for New London.

If you feel like the above is a lot to manage, you’re absolutely right. Frostpunk 2 delivers a dense strategy game that takes time, but it also comes with plenty of challenges that are sure to delight seasoned strategy players. Because of this, the learning curve will be on the steeper end for newcomers. However, if you’re relatively new to strategy games and/or the world of Frostpunk, but are willing to put in the time, don’t fret: the game’s story mode does a stellar job of introducing concepts gradually, effectively easing players into its world slowly. Over a prologue and five chapters, you’ll not only get the hang of the game’s core mechanics, but you’ll get a beautiful introduction to the game’s overall story as well.

Overall, Frostpunk 2 is a game that is as beautiful and rewarding as it is challenging and brutal, which is not an easy balance to strike for a developer. It’s clear that the 11 bit team have put the work in, as Frostpunk 2 offers a layered gameplay experience that thoughtfully expands on the foundations of the original Frostpunk in both game mechanics and story. If that sounds like your jam, Frostpunk 2 is not to be missed.