Frostpunk is a city-building strategy survival game developed and published by 11 bit studios. It was released for PC in April 2018, and was released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in October 2019.
Frostpunk is a city building game with survival parts thrown in for good measure. Set in an ice filled Britain, it is up to you to manage the city and its inhabitants and help them survive the frozen habitat by building up a settlement located around an operational steam generator.
As you start the game you’ll find that resources are limited, and any mismanagement of your inventory could prove to be your undoing as your population will quickly dwindle if you send them out of reach of the heat provided by the generator. Those of you familiar with city building games will probably adapt to this fairly quickly, while those of you who aren’t so well versed in building worlds might initially struggle with this. It is well worth persevering though as Frostpunk is a fantastic game that is very easy to sink a lot of time into, although its not without its faults.
The aim of the game is survival, but if you think the only thing you have to worry about is the weather then I’m afraid you’re in for a rude awakening, as the population can be equally as severe when it comes to reacting to your leadership. Along the way you’ll be expected to make some hard decisions, while at the same time trying to balance the Hope and Discontent bars that are found at the bottom of your screen. If your Hope bars falls too low you’ll start to see and hear the population actively talk about removing you from your leadership. Continue to let the Hope meter drop without any attempts to address it and before long you’ll be overthrown. To combat this you can use the Faith and Order options that are available to you. Faith based options will allow you to take the spiritual approach, with Order being a more efficiency based leadership. I would have liked to see tutorials that explained how some of the various features in Frostpunk worked, as there is what I found to be a relatively steep learning curve.
Visually Frostpunk is an impressive looking title, although the citizens themselves look a little bland at times. The world around the generator is bleak, hostile and unforgiving, but incredibly well designed. Workers will leave a trail of footsteps as they trudge through the snow, fires flicker against buildings, and I love the inclusion of a thermal view which allows you to gauge how far the heat radiates out to other areas. Zooming in to watch the inhabitants of the world will allow you to see exactly what they are up to and hear them in conversation which is a nice touch. There are a few jagged edges but for the most part everything looks very good and there was never any hint of slow-down or delayed response to inputs throughout my 10+ hours of gameplay.
Sometimes with games like this, one of the hardest things to deal with can be the controls. Often when a game is ported from PC to Console there are issues with scaling down the input options to all fit on to a control pad. Frostpunk comes with a full reworked control scheme that feels intuitive and not overwhelming like other city building games that have come from PC previously. It does still take a little getting used to, using the analogue sticks on a gaming pad will never come close to whizzing around the screen with a mouse but it does come fairly close.
Frostpunk is a game that will punish your every indecision and have you constantly second guessing your every move, however it is also very rewarding to see some of your choices play out with positive results. Frostpunk might not be for everyone, however gamers looking for a challenging city building/survival game need look no further.
JamieReloaded23's Rating: 4/5
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JamieReloaded23
Gamerscore addict & Manchester United fan. PR Manager for XenAndCL
and occasional review writer for Xbox Game Reviews.
Addicted to anything pickled.
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