The brief tutorial leads me through the creations of coal mines, resource centres, housing districts, and founding a council. It does a solid job of easing you into its many systems and mechanics, an impressive feat considering how complicated it can be for the uninitiated.
Frostpunk 2 sees you building and managing a post apocalyptic settlement in the harshest of climates. The preview took place on the Windswept Peaks map, which features a community of machinists and foragers, and claims to have "relatively easy access to key resources" Given that even on easy, the lowest of four difficulty levels, it took some serious work not to freeze half of my citizens to death before I hit the 300 week limit, I'm scared about what difficult looks like.
The industrial district turns your raw materials into useful items that the other districts will require, alongside the constant heat source from the initially coal-powered generator. You also have food and housing districts, which are self explanatory, and finally a logistics district to coordinate exploration teams into certain parts of the map to gather valuables you may need.
Settlements evoke a similar feeling as the first game, but with a cleaner, brighter, and more futuristic edge to them. That's mostly thanks to the clever use of lighting, which makes me feel more like I'm living in a cyberpunk city. I really don't want to live in this frozen wasteland, but if I have to, at least my house looks cool.
Your resources will run out quickly, with only a couple of small sources of food and fuel, so you need to explore as soon as you can to find an alternative supply. While doing this you also need to expand your basic settlement, in order to secure enough workers to keep everything running. Finally, you need to balance not just the supplies but also the will of the people so they actually feel like putting in the effort to stay alive. If not, nothing will work out.
There are two factions to begin with, Machinists and Foragers, and you can't keep them both happy at once. You'll need to research to obtain technology key to survival, and also pass laws through a council to keep the community in check. Both of these actions require choices. Lots of choices. And they all have consequences.
You can cause deaths by starvation, freezing, squalor, disease, and riots if you don't pass certain laws, you fail to procure specific resources, or favour one faction over another in the city. You can even cause deaths by making the wrong choice in terms of what kind of factories you build, as once again the research decisions are faction or belief aligned. Will you favour natural or machine solutions? Do you want to be an open or closed city? Will you choose productivity over inclusivity? How about honouring traditions? It's all on you, so get used to it.
If you want a nice calm city builder then do yourself a favour and play pretty much anything else in the genre. Frostpunk is all about survival. From cracking the ice, to exploring dangerous and difficult terrain in search of enough food, it makes you work hard to survive, and even harder to thrive. But, as in the first game, the satisfaction of getting everything in balance is second to none, even though I've only had a very small taster of what's to come.
