The world came to an end in 1887. That’s a sobering line to start any game with, but here you already feel the seeping cold and unflinching hardness of Frostpunk. Launched last year on PC, this survival city builder imagines a past where a new ice age arrived, and where humanity is on the brink of extinction. It’s your task to keep the remaining people alive, and it’s fair to say that this is one of the most gruelling, most intensive and most involving survival games of all time. It is, for want of any other word, a masterpiece.
You begin Frostpunk 2 with The Wanderers, a prologue designed to get you up to speed, and one which hardens the narrative strands dangled in front of you at the start of the game’s narrative mode. Here, you get a sense of how people have survived this stricken, frozen planet, with nomadic groups returning to the hulking great furnaces that they huddle around when a whiteout comes. The need for survival, and the need for everyone to pull in the same direction, is immediately hammered home, and the hammering won’t stop the further you go.
Frostpunk 2 has to be the most cinematic city builder I’ve ever played. The sense of drama, emotion and gravitas shouldn’t be possible when you’re placing down structures, setting jobs and tinkering with menus, but there’s something about Frostpunk 2 that’s immediately affecting.
The ravening wind, the shouts of the workers as they build, the clank of extraction units pulling oil from the ground; there’s a constant soundscape at play here that brings the world to life, enhanced by the strains of the plaintive orchestral soundtrack. It feels real and imposing, and that sense of realness, of the thin line between life and death, permeates every aspect of the game.
Key within that are the politics and factions at work within your city. When things are going wrong, they look for someone to blame, and when things are going right, someone somewhere will still be unhappy. While it might be set in an imagined post-apocalyptic timeline, Frostpunk 2 still offers one of the most realistic takes on politics and public life we’ve seen in gaming. You might be able to pacify a couple of communities with your decisions, but there will always be an outlier, or a wrinkle provided by a new faction within them, and you have to navigate the ebb and flow of popularity, patience and penance, as you try to maintain your role as Steward of this frigid cityscape.
You need to maintain forward motion in Frostpunk 2, otherwise, you will, quite literally, find yourself frozen in place. Expansion and research play a significant role in preparing for the harsher moments, when temperatures drop dangerously low, and your populace huddles slightly closer to the furnaces.
While you begin from a single central point in New London, you must identify the weaknesses in your supply chains, whether that’s food, oil or other commodities, and then prepare expeditions to break through the frostbitten ground to clear a path that will allow you to extract the necessary natural resource from the ground.
That’s all dictated by time. From the tutorial’s hurried push to build enough food surplus, Frostpunk 2 sets you on a path that requires split-second action and decisiveness. Every act takes time, and just as with your political standing, you have to find the balance between pushing further out into the wilderness or cementing what you have, pushing forward with better technologies that will make what little you do have go further, rather than hitting upon a new but finite vein.
Playing Frostpunk 2 is clawing and claustrophobic. You feel a constant weight of expectation and tension while playing, and that sensation hasn’t been lost in its transition to console. The navigation with a controller does, in some way, enhance it. That’s down to the slightly unwieldy nature of the tool you’ve been given, and, like one of your citizens swinging a spade into the ice rather than a pickaxe, it will get you somewhere, but it’s much harder work.
Playing on console, the central control mechanisms of moving, building and frostbreaking, are handled quite elegantly with a touch of the right shoulder button bringing up the main interface while you cycle through the resulting menus with the D-pad. You soon become accustomed to shifting between different areas, and the readouts and resource markers are very clear and easy to parse, even on a TV at distance, letting you build an expand your cityscape with some certainty.
It’s the wider menus where the ice gets a little bit slushy. Pressing the Square button brings up the Extended City View, and from here you’re able to move between a variety of different sections with the analogue stick or D-pad, but choosing the particular area you need to access isn’t always handled properly, and I found myself having to back in and out having made the wrong selection again, while occasionally making additional buildings in districts didn’t register correctly.
That’s then compounded by some odd freezing in certain menus, which would only be slightly ironic if it wasn’t quite so frustrating. In a game where you’re fighting for survival and where every moment matters, it’s not just an annoying speedbump, it’s a block in the road. Despite how good Frostpunk 2 is, I’d currently hold off on buying the game on console until there’s confirmation that it’s been remedied with an early patch.
The controller implementation overall is satisfactory, but I’d like to see more development time given to it in the long run. It’s never going to match the ease of interacting with a mouse, but then there are some things that a controller simply can’t match a mouse for, and city builders and RTS games sit at the top of the pile. I hope that we might see a Switch 2 port for Frostpunk 2 at some point, but I do wonder what sacrifices would have to be made to get it running there.
Frostpunk 2 benefits from a strong visual identity, and though there’s clearly a lot of snow, frost and a reliance on the colour white, the burgeoning lights of the city, and its glowing infrastructure really make it pop from the screen, while the detailed portraits emphasise the human element at play. Those visuals are at their best in Fidelity mode, and on the base PS5, performance is good, albeit at 30fps, with things staying steady as you sweep and spin across your city, zooming in and out to different districts and expansions.
You can occasionally make things skip a beat if you’ve filled the landscape and you’re shifting around at speed, but it doesn’t diminish the game in any way. You also have the option of a zippy 60fps Performance Mode, or a Balanced 40fps option if your screen supports 120Hz. This was definitely the best of both worlds, and makes everything feel considerably smoother, but I still missed the sheer glory of the Fidelity Mode, and in a city builder, it’s more than possible to live with 30fps.