First impressions: Frostpunk

Recently, I’ve set a goal to play at least a few of the CIty builders, and especially those with a focus towards survival. This game came out last year I think, and I heard about it through a podcast. Maybe you can say it’s more of a base building game, but I still put it into the category of survival city builders. It’s set in a future where the earth is suffering from Global cooling, yes, not warming, but cooling. You have quite a small area with limited resources to work with and things can get quite hectic at times.

Graphics

The graphics are definitely nice in this game, even though everything is icy. It has some nice effects and I really love some of the buildings. The game has some cutscenes, but these are nothing special.

Audio

The sound effects are nice, and I love some of the voiceover lines. The music is fantastic. You can listen to it on Spotify if you like that kind of music. It works really well for the mood of this game.

User interface

The user interface works fine for the most part, even though I sometimes find myself trying to find specific buildings when things get cluttered later on.

Gameplay

Usually in this type of game, I go for sandbox mode if available. Here however I went straight for the first scenario. I think there is a sand box mode available now, but I haven’t tried it. The whole point of this game is that things get worse over time. You start with a limited set of buildings and very few people, and this game is played over days instead of years, so things happen quite quickly here. You can assign new laws and research new tech to unlock new buildings. Laws will affect the two major stats in this game. Hope and discontent. You’ll have to make quite a few decisions that makes you feel terrible in this game, and you usually seem to end up with some kind of extremist community. On my first attempt I was banished for bad leadership. You grow your population through immigration. The first scenario is basically survival, but on the second one you have to try to keep seeds alive, starting with just a few scientists. Each scenario also has an extra hard survival mode that you can try if you don’t feel challanged enough. The resource management part of this game is nice, and doesn’t feel to easy. During the course of the game you also get a lot of time limited quests from your population, such as heat all homes or treat all sick people. You usually have several options when these quests pop up. If you don’t feel you can do everything they want, you can gain some hope by at least doing something.

Conclusion

If you like the less releaxed type of city building/management games, this is definitely worth picking up. I loved the setthing and how things really got worse over time. In some games it’s the oposite; things start difficult and becomes easy once you get everything sorted out. I highly recommend this game.

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