Frostpunk 2‘s leap to PlayStation 5 and Xbox X|S brings the compelling PC city-building game to consoles, retaining the effective worldbuilding for a memorably grim story. The sequel to Frostpunk launched on macOS and Windows PC in 2024, earning strong reviews for its intricate city-building gameplay, immersive storytelling, and a complex moral core. Strategy fans who prefer the console experience can find many of the same strengths in the new port of the title, which does a solid job overall of adapting the story from PC.
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While the real-time strategy aspects of the city-building gameplay run into natural difficulties in the transition from mouse-and-keyboard to a controller, the execution of Frostpunk 2‘s story is enough to lure players back time and time again. The depth of the worldbuilding ensures the campaign can play out in several different ways, all dependent on the player’s choices amid tough situations. The result is an engrossing strategy game that’s hard to put down, even when the controls become frustrating.
Rating: 4/5
| Pros: | Cons: |
| An engrossing storyline keeps players invested in a challenging campaign mode | Clunky menu design and controls aren’t conducive to the console experience |
| The challenging campaign feeds naturally into the storytelling, integrating gameplay and worldbuilding to great effect | Clunky menu design and controls aren’t conducive to an enjoyable console experience |
| Utopia Builder sets up a potentially endless sandbox for players to experiment with | Minor glitches and hiccups can draw players out of the immersive experience |
A Grim Tale Of Hope At The End Of The World Makes Frostpunk 2 Deeply Engrossing
Frostpunk 2 works best on a thematic and storytelling level, with the most engrossing aspects of the RTS gameplay stemming from the natural moral quandaries that arise in building sanctuaries amid the end of the world. Taking place decades after the previous entry in the series, players enter the frozen world of Frostpunk 2 as a Steward. The newly appointed leader of New London, the Steward is expected to guide the city through the harsh and endless winter storms known as White Out. Doing so requires expanding the city into a barren wasteland, making the most of scant resources, and exploring the great unknown of a massive world map.
The trick to Frostpunk 2 that keeps it from feeling too indebted to games like Civilization is a sheer commitment to the apocalyptic steampunk aesthetic and storytelling. The greatest challenges in ensuring New London survives often stem from New London itself. Different political and religious factions rise up and cause trouble for each other (and the Steward), requiring diplomacy and negotiation for the sake of survival. The tasks never feel overwhelming, in part due to the game’s deliberate use of time to highlight the barren landscape and hopeless tone. Instead, they feel like natural evolutions of the city you’re building, so a cascading series of challenges feel like your own fault instead of by design.
New factions combat one another and play into other conflicts on the other side of the world. Even the addition of a representative government system within the world requires players to adapt and work with others, or risk making the situation impossible and requiring a restart. Every restart hurts and feels like a loss, playing into the thematic strength of the game and its themes. It makes the desire to succeed all the more pressing, encouraging invention and deliberation through repeated loss until the tasks can be solved. It’s a natural immersion into the tone and story of the game, a terrific example of how a game can deliver an engrossing story that fits naturally into the gameplay and world.
Frostpunk 2 Can’t Solve A Seemingly Unfixable Problem
The biggest knock against Frostpunk 2 on the PlayStation 5 is a simple reality that extends to strategy games that leap to consoles: this genre tends to play better on PC. The massive landscape of Frostpunk 2‘s overworld can be hard to keep track of with the use of analog sticks over a mouse, especially as New London expands to dozens of settlements and districts. Keeping track of everything works better in Frostpunk 2 than it does in other strategy games on the console, but it’s still tricky in a way that can quickly become frustrating as players go through several menus and button prompts to find simple actions.
The controls simply suffer from the limitations of controllers over a keyboard and mouse setup, which can lead to repeated efforts to figure out simple paths. The specific strengths of the console experience over a PC don’t really translate to something like Frostpunk 2‘s gameplay, and it can be frustrating. Luckily, the story is engrossing enough to draw players in despite these challenges, making it a must-buy for strategy fans who typicallyly don’t go in for PC gaming. Every time I’d spend time trying to remind myself how to do something in the HUD, I’d be focused on figuring it out so I could get back to debating which risks to throw my explorers into. To Frostpunk 2‘s credit, the integration of the gameplay and worldbuilding with the actual gameplay loop largely overcomes the format challenges, speaking to the strength of the game design.
Frostpunk 2 Is All About Survival, No Matter The Cost
Playing Frostpunk 2 is a fascinating moral challenge, with a willingness to not just be complex but outright bleak in the player choices. Allowing the elderly to die to reserve food supplies, leaving settlements to die out for the betterment of the greater city, using violence to settle unrest between factions, all of these choices are presented bluntly and practically. There’s no moralizing in the narrative, just a sense of action and consequence that puts the player dead center of the story. This gives Frostpunk 2 a clear arc that feels like it really revolves around you.
Even difficult gameplay and frequent need to reattempt campaign levels play into the experience, failed experiments in survival that linger in the player’s mind as they take another stab at it. It’s an impressive feat from the strategy game, a testament to the worldbuilding and execution of 11 bit studios in developing the story of Frostpunk 2. Completing the campaign even unlocks the theoretically endless Utopia Mode, taking the challenge beyond the arc of the narrative creatives and into the world of limitless potential. Players could build out their versions of New London across a larger world
Even the leap to consoles and the resulting gameplay challenges that it presents to a city-building RTS can’t diminish the engrossing strengths of Frostpunk 2. Strategy fans who didn’t play the title on PC may face some challenges with the controls, but the effective storytelling and moral quandaries keep inviting players to return. Especially for gamers who want to explore a compelling strategy title in the console space, Frostpunk 2 is a bleak dream come true.
ComicBook was provided a PS5 code for the purposes of this review.
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Image courtesy of Lucasfilm
