Frostpunk 2

This is a completely different kind of game from Frostpunk. In Frostpunk, you were almost always a hardscrabble tiny settlement of a few dozen, struggling to survive day by day as you remove 1 or 2 people from one workplace in order to just barely fill up another workplace in order to make ends meet. Every day was a long grind with never enough time to do all the work needing to be done to the point where you could force people to work longer hours, or even 24 hour shifts, while scraping together the last few shreds of meat and sawdust to make enough food rations to offer as compensation so the 24 hour shift decision doesn't lead to a full scale revolt. Here, you can start off with a city of 10,000 or more. Days can pass without the generator even being on (absolutely insane idea in the first game), and days pass like seconds. Weeks can go by. Months. Even years. Frostpunk was heavy on the survival emphasis. You had to manage a tiny group of people and try to bring as many of them through to the end of each scenario alive. In Frostpunk 2, people are almost expendable, as you can regularly have them die off by the hundreds and it be just a nuisance reminder to build some extra housing or install insulation while you manage land. This isn't inherently inferior to the first game; it's a major step up in scale as you no longer deal with a generator surrounded by huts and tents and steam pipes. Now your generator itself is a fully built up city, and you build entire districts dedicated to one specific thing or another (such as resource exctration, farming, complex manufacturing, or just housing). With the scaling up of gameplay mechanics comes a scaling up in complexity. Managing multiple districts and their resource needs takes up the vast majority of your time here, and sometimes there's just nothing you can do other than burn through your stockpiles for months at a time just to keep from running out of a vital resource or keeping people alive. The problem is that this resource managing aspect is already a full time job in itself, and the game makes it worse by piling on even more problems and responsibilities onto you with the politics. Instead of just "all the people" complaining about the cold or the lack of food or shelter, political factions emerge with specific ideologies and demands, even down to what sort of mining techniques or farming fertilizer is to be used. The main story campaign does a good enough job of spacing out all these demands so that you can pick up the mechanics of the game, but the story campaign, including the bonus chapter added by the DLC, is shorter than even just 1 campaign from the first game. Once you're done with the story (it took me 7 hours total to finish), there's nothing left to do with this game other than play the open sandbox mode (Endless Mode in frostpunk1). They have different "tales" you can apply to this mode to give your sandbox a sense of structure, and it does a good job of making it feel like a whole new campaign. The problem is that unlike the main story, everything is dumped on you all at once and you are expected to be up and running as soon as possible. You have good stockpiles of resources to start with but these only work for maintaining upkeep. To actually build and expand, you need to use Heatstamps (money), Prefabs (building material), and Workforce (people), and these things run out incredibly fast. Even just clearing land out for laying districts costs money and takes time and work to do, and the districts all require some amount of heating so the more of them you build, the more fuel you burn. All the while political factions are rapidly rising and starting to make demands, and unlike the first game where you could issue laws with impunity, now every law has to be voted on and every vote involves negotiating with one or more factions to persuade them, with the most common method being making promises, helping them further their agenda in some way. Even playing on the lowest difficulty setting does not stop this deluge of stuff and events from piling up on you, and oftentimes you're put in situations where you're held back by one resource or another that just can't be traded, hustled, skimmed, scammed, or stolen for, such as Workforce or Prefabs. There is no steady source for prefabs so if you are running a huge Materials deficit and don't have any existing prefab deposits on the map, you may as well completely start over. This is all way too much way too quickly in this game and most of all it's just not fun. Frostpunk 1 could be brutal and insane but it was always fun to try again and again. Frostpunk 2 feels more like work than a game, and it's just not fun to barely scrape by from one political crisis to another, pushing back one critical resource shortage by creating a new one, like paying off credit card debt with a 2nd credit card. After an hour, I'm exhausted and want to play a different game instead, a game more like Frostpunk 1.