Frostpunk 2’s beta offers a gripping slice of stressful city-building

15.04.2024 - 21:41 / digitaltrends.com / Tomas Franzese

Typically, playing city-based or civilization-building games is a relaxing experience for me. There’s an inherent satisfaction in something I created in Cities: Skylines 2 or Mini Motorways running efficiently based on my actions. I’m content with spending dozens of hours crafting a functioning world, and only occasionally having my skills tested in a high-intensity situation. Frostpunk 2 from 11 bit Studios is a city-builder where those feelings are often reversed. Most of my time playing its beta was extremely stressful, as I constantly had to make difficult decisions in order to preserve a society that established itself in a frosty postapocalypse.

For all 300 in-game weeks of playtime that Frostpunk 2’s Utopia Builder mode beta offers, I was constantly facing the looming threat of dwindling resources and multiple political factions all vying for my attention and power, all while trying to build a civilization up. While that got extremely stressful, I’m already gripped by my short time with Frostpunk 2.

Stay frosty

While the original Frostpunk was a real-time strategy game about rebuilding a single settlement, 11 bit Studios has previously explained that this sequel is about leading that established settlement into a thriving civilization. The world of Frostpunk has not gotten any more forgiving; it’s still a postapocalyptic place with intense frost and little in the way of resources. The mose I played, Utopia Builder, is Frostpunk 2’s free-building mode. In it, players aren’t tied down to a prewritten story; as such, this beta is designed purely to give players a look into most of Frostpunk 2’s gameplay system — and it does that in spectacular fashion. At a basic level, players need to build up their city while earning money and providing enough heat, shelter, and food to minimize death.

To start, I expanded my city by frost=breaking nearby land so I could build districts on those tiles. Districts focus on important elements like housing, food, or industry. I could also add buildings to those individual districts to increase their efficiency. Ideally, I’d quickly find a way to maximize efficiency and then bask in my success as I watched the city grow.

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Frostpunk 2 makes doing that quite difficult, though.

First off, space is limited, and this world is also quite deadly. If any of those mentioned resources falter, people will die, and entire districts could potentially shut down and stop providing resources. On top of that, the citizens of this city are all part of different factions that