Frostpunk Review: The most difficult and profound construction simulation game

Frostpunk is a city building and social simulation game, but above all it is a crisis management game and that crisis won’t end until the game is over. After a few hours of playing Frostpunk then the tornadoes and tsunamis in the game Cities: Skylines like a kid’s game. The traffic jams and air pollution you used to fear are now just a joke. In Frostpunk, If the inhabitants are not satisfied, they will banish you from their own city and leave you to die in solitude and contempt. They may leave the city if you fail them, but before that they will spend days persuading others to follow suit. Frostpunk is an engaging and extremely intense survival strategy game with a lot of difficult, sometimes unimaginable choices. It’s hard to play and even harder to stop.

Steam Tower

In the 1800s version of Frostpunk, The whole world has become a cold, wild land. After escaping from London, your only hope of survivors is a large brazier in the center of the crater. You will build a small city around this towering brazier to keep warm. Gathering initially consisted of residents pushing snow flakes chest high to collect coal in the cold and opening old wooden crates for scrap wood and iron. Build a laboratory with staff and engineers to start researching new technologies: sawmills to cut frozen trees, mines to excavate materials from the ground. The streets will eventually form spokes emanating from the brazier, and you’ll line them up with buildings and steam towers to melt the ice – at least until the temperature drops further.

But that’s a problem later. In the early days, your city was very sparse and the situation was quite bad, with scarce materials – and the manpower to gather them too – thus seeing the sun rise overnight. without any casualties can be considered a victory. Each new building and equipment on the skill tree needs to be carefully considered before deciding to spend resources on it. Building a pub can make people happy, but that wood is also needed to build a medical center. Assigning more hunters to forage also meant resting coal-collecting workers, solving one problem creating another. Saving materials to build something important tomorrow when so many people are homeless and food is cruel but absolutely necessary. When asked the question “What do my people need most?” Then the answer is simple: everything.

After hours of playing you’ll feel disgusted with every single inhabitant of your city, torn between short-term and long-term solutions for them, guilt over extending the work to dig a few more. more coals to keep the brazier burning all night. There are many difficult but wonderful choices waiting for you in Frostpunk, with very few of them being completely right or completely wrong.

While your eyes will be constantly on the gauges at the top of the screen – how much coal and food is left and how long it will take for them to run out, you will have to pay more attention to the larger ruler at the bottom of the screen. : Discontent and Hope, Real City Health Scales. Make residents work 24 hours continuously and the scale of dissatisfaction will increase sharply, although a lot of work will save a lot of lives. Putting people to bed early on a full stomach will give them a lot of hope, even though they are sleeping in cold tents. If the level of dissatisfaction grows too high, or the level of hope is too low, you may be told that you only have a few days to improve things by completing certain goals. The wood you used to use to build steel mills instead of new houses may end up making your city more prosperous, but you broke your promise to provide shelter for everyone, so the inhabitants will lose their lives. faith in you. This is a prime example of the burden of leadership.

You’ll be regularly notified if something bleak is happening in your city. A child was found frozen, sitting at the grave of his parents. A citizen commits suicide by jumping into a brazier. Someone overtime to death. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do about these situations: they’re just moments where the game wants you to feel like you’re out of control.

Sometimes you can choose between: keep an exhausted worker at work or let him rest, or believe or not a resident demands more food for his hungry child while they may be lying. You’ve been forewarned that your decision may change the level of dissatisfaction or the level of hope, but the truth is that you often have to make people unhappy if you want to keep them alive. And by enacting rules, you’ll have to make choices that are more meaningful and much more difficult.

Human Resources

You can issue a new rule every 18 hours, and very few of them make you feel proud. To make sure everyone has enough food to eat, you can cut down on the portion size and replace it with sawdust. To keep output rising, you can use child labor. You can work hard to heal the seriously ill or just focus on the people you are sure you can save. Almost every rule has a bad side: obviously kids shouldn’t have to work, especially gathering coal in the deadly cold or working in a dangerous brazier, they’re just kids, but give it a try. consider that when you only have enough coal to last another hour and night is about to fall.

Ultimately, you must choose how to keep your residents motivated in the face of endless winter. Will it be by order and discipline, or by faith and spirit? Both avenues of legislation can give people hope, mainly through the use of control that will eventually turn you into a false god. A neighborhood security team sounds like a good idea since theft is rampant everywhere consuming food and resources. Watchtowers also make sense for killing troublemakers. Patrols catch criminals, criminals get jail time, and soon you’ll find yourself contemplating building a propaganda center to hand out fliers to reassure residents that everything is fine. are under control. They need to believe that things “will be okay,” or at least you need them to, for them to have hope. Either that or risk losing everything.

Whereas the path of faith gives you temples and pagodas to reassure people, but of course this is only a very small step towards making you a leader they can trust. You might think you’d never consider publicly executing a harasser in the middle of a city, but in those desperate moments when you’re about to be kicked out of your city and face-to-face. death, a little cruelty isn’t necessarily the scariest thing, just one of many worst choices.

These decisions are not pleasant at all, but Frostpunk excelled at striking the balance between being a good leader and being an effective leader. Sometimes you will feel like a bad guy when he does the right thing or a hero when he does the wrong thing, something that few games can offer.

Ice fishing

Frostpunk It’s not just the cold little city: there’s a wider frozen world out there, and once you’ve built an observation post that rises above the crater, send scout groups out to investigate the areas. new. This is a fun twist to open up the view beyond the smoky chimneys and narrow streets and get to explore. Search for survivors in need or find the remains of another city. Like many things in Frostpunk, The results of these expeditions were either a success or a burden. Sometimes scouts will find resources and bring them back to the city. You can even build a plantation to bring wood, food or other materials to your city every day.

But, although new residents meant more workers and engineers, it also meant more houses to be built and heated, more food to be hunted and cooked, and more sick people. in an already overcrowded hospital. Every pair of hands contributes to industry and an extra mouth costs food. At some point, several large waves of refugees will arrive, most of them very sick, leading to either building a series of new facilities, or expelling some or even all of them. they go. If you originally enacted a law that said working children would get double rations (a benevolent gesture compensates for a cruel gesture), that means saving dozens of abandoned children on the side. out of the city is not entirely good. Frostpunk It’s impressive to make you doubt, even regret, your acts of kindness.

Reconnaissance also gathers information about what’s happening in the world, why it’s happening, and even more painfully: what’s going to happen next. And let’s say it’s not going to be good news.

Cruelty

Imagine this situation: Your city is doing very well, if it’s not perfect, it’s acceptable; you are building warehouses to store coal and wood; intends to replace tents with real houses, keep warm with steam towers, which means no one will get sick; you plan to build a factory to create robots that can work non-stop, and even create a robot to manage that robot factory; low dissatisfaction and high hopes. And boom! The scout brings bad news. Everything changes in an instant, and the level of hope is almost completely swallowed up and with it your own hope. You want to continue with your previous plans, but now have to put that aside to focus on restoring hope or dealing with setbacks.

You may feel unfair at first, extremely unfair. I myself worked too hard to keep the city safe and running smoothly, and the reward was that half of the population naturally decided to leave. You’ve done everything the right way, tactically and structurally, but people are still unhappy and it will take some time for you to accept that: Frostpunk can betray you so quickly.

But this game isn’t just about building a city, it’s about communicating with society, and real life is like that sometimes, like when scientists develop a vaccine but parents Mom turned to Jenny McCarthy (actor) to ask for child advice. When you give society a machine to help them live, they will probably hit the wrench straight into the gears. Society is boring. Robots would never do that.

Apocalypse

Frostpunk It’s not an endless game: it’s about 45 days long and puts your city and inhabitants in precarious situations. It will be quite strange to see the game over, because most games of this genre allow you to play until you get bored. But you can play again and make different decisions: choose a different set of rules, correct the mistakes of the previous play, but the events and major discoveries will always be the same. One play is enough to unlock nearly everything on the skill tree, so replays won’t be any different and offer completely new experiences.

Frostpunk also has great visual style and design. Like the way steam rises when the sun illuminates your city after a long night, water droplets condense on your screen as you breathe a sigh of relief you’ve lived another day, and how the inhabitants The little girl waded through the high snow leaving a black trench behind, which was then filled with snow. It’s strangely beautiful and fascinating in a cold world.

Frostpunk keeps the camera angle higher out of the gritty of the city, so you can’t really connect with it. Sometimes you wish you could see with your own eyes what’s on people’s faces, see how they’re feeling, and feel the hope and sadness for yourself without the need for scales. But after all, who has time for this? We still have more coal to dig, sometimes you may lose, but don’t lose hope.

Source: PCGamer