Frostpunk 2

[DDC]

I am performing my public service by informing you all that this game is terrible. I wasn't a huge fan of the first game, but found it enjoyable for a single runthrough. I assumed the second one would also be worth a download since it dropped day one on PC gamepass. It's not.

Frostpunk 2 probably has the worst visual and UI design of any game I've ever played in my life. The graphics are pretty, but it's almost impossible to tell what's going on. Instead of building a "city" like the first game, you start off with the city you built last time as your central district (which you can't do much with), and you expand it by adding other districts around it. These other districts are things like housing, mining, etc., and they are made up of 6 hex tiles (that can be expanded to 9 or 12). You get bonuses for having 3 tiles of one district adjacent to 3 tiles from another district, so it's in your interest to lay them out in bizarre gerrymandered shapes and make it as messy as possible. You can also put up to two add-on buildings in each district (like putting a guardhouse in a housing district).

This is where it turns into a complete shitshow. The visuals are so cluttered that telling say...a food district from a housing district...isn't the easiest thing. Telling where one housing district ends and another begins isn't possible unless certain menus are open since the map shows no clear boundaries. And telling what buildings you have in each district is literally impossible unless you click around the amorphous boundaries of each individual district (that the mechanics encouraged you to make messy and intertwined with the others) to open its menu and see its building slots. And one would think that clicking the building slots for each districts menu would let you ... put buildings in them. No, of course not. You have to open a completely separate menu of buildings, scroll through to find the ones relevant to that district, and then look around on the map again to find the district you just had a menu open for. And keep in mind that you will frequently need to access these buildings to turn them on and off, which involves a meandering search every few minutes. It truly is developer incompetence of epic proportions.

Frostpunk 2 also falls prey to long stretches where you have nothing to do, because everything in the game requires money ("heatstamps") to build or research, and you cannot build anything that increases your money supply. The obvious thing would be to let the player build happy merchant districts, but instead you are constrained by (and the game is substantially lengthened by) being completely dependent on a meager passive income of money. You can harrass each population faction to pay you a tribute, but that can only be done once a year, so your income is very capped. This means a lot of sitting around waiting while your resource stockpiles are overflowing and you have hordes of idle workers, because you cannot build structures to put them to work without money.

Lastly, the campaign is just bad, and beating the cold has become almost irrelevant. Spoilers will follow.

► Show Spoiler

The big storm at the end of Frostpunk 1 was pretty cool because it made you feel like you might lose. Temperatures dropped, people were freezing and dying, sacrifices had to be made. There is nothing really like that in Frostpunk 2. After a tutorial scenario and then getting dropped in your real base and building it up a bit, you get a warning that a storm is coming. The storm came, nobody ever got cold, no tough decisions needed to be made, but my resources got sort of low and I was thinking "not bad for an intro to the blizzard mechanic, could get cool later in the game." Except it wasn't an "intro" to the mechanic. That was the storm. The remainder of the game consisted of anticlimaxes -- building an outpost to mine "cores" to upgrade your heat generator (except you don't need an upgraded generator for anything because you just beat the only storm in the game with an un-upgraded generator. You do that and then some "civil war" breaks out between the factions in your city as the "climax." To surmount this obstacle, I had to ... build two prisons in a housing district and throw the rabble-rousers in jail. I was never in jeopardy, I had hundreds of thousands of resources stockpiled for the big storm that never came, and the game just ended. There was never an all-hands on deck existential crisis. It took about 9 hours, but if not for the time spent digging through the ****** UI and waiting on money income, it probably would have taken 4 hours tops.

[BLofbr]

I am performing my public service by informing you all that this game is terrible. I wasn't a huge fan of the first game, but found it enjoyable for a single runthrough. I assumed the second one would also be worth a download since it dropped day one on PC gamepass. It's not.

Frostpunk 2 probably has the worst visual and UI design of any game I've ever played in my life. The graphics are pretty, but it's almost impossible to tell what's going on. Instead of building a "city" like the first game, you start off with the city you built last time as your central district (which you can't do much with), and you expand it by adding other districts around it. These other districts are things like housing, mining, etc., and they are made up of 6 hex tiles (that can be expanded to 9 or 12). You get bonuses for having 3 tiles of one district adjacent to 3 tiles from another district, so it's in your interest to lay them out in bizarre gerrymandered shapes and make it as messy as possible. You can also put up to two add-on buildings in each district (like putting a guardhouse in a housing district).

This is where it turns into a complete shitshow. The visuals are so cluttered that telling say...a food district from a housing district...isn't the easiest thing. Telling where one housing district ends and another begins isn't possible unless certain menus are open since the map shows no clear boundaries. And telling what buildings you have in each district is literally impossible unless you click around the amorphous boundaries of each individual district (that the mechanics encouraged you to make messy and intertwined with the others) to open its menu and see its building slots. And one would think that clicking the building slots for each districts menu would let you ... put buildings in them. No, of course not. You have to open a completely separate menu of buildings, scroll through to find the ones relevant to that district, and then look around on the map again to find the district you just had a menu open for. And keep in mind that you will frequently need to access these buildings to turn them on and off, which involves a meandering search every few minutes. It truly is developer incompetence of epic proportions.

Frostpunk 2 also falls prey to long stretches where you have nothing to do, because everything in the game requires money ("heatstamps") to build or research, and you cannot build anything that increases your money supply. The obvious thing would be to let the player build happy merchant districts, but instead you are constrained by (and the game is substantially lengthened by) being completely dependent on a meager passive income of money. You can harrass each population faction to pay you a tribute, but that can only be done once a year, so your income is very capped. This means a lot of sitting around waiting while your resource stockpiles are overflowing and you have hordes of idle workers, because you cannot build structures to put them to work without money.

Lastly, the campaign is just bad, and beating the cold has become almost irrelevant. Spoilers will follow.

► Show Spoiler

The big storm at the end of Frostpunk 1 was pretty cool because it made you feel like you might lose. Temperatures dropped, people were freezing and dying, sacrifices had to be made. There is nothing really like that in Frostpunk 2. After a tutorial scenario and then getting dropped in your real base and building it up a bit, you get a warning that a storm is coming. The storm came, nobody ever got cold, no tough decisions needed to be made, but my resources got sort of low and I was thinking "not bad for an intro to the blizzard mechanic, could get cool later in the game." Except it wasn't an "intro" to the mechanic. That was the storm. The remainder of the game consisted of anticlimaxes -- building an outpost to mine "cores" to upgrade your heat generator (except you don't need an upgraded generator for anything because you just beat the only storm in the game with an un-upgraded generator. You do that and then some "civil war" breaks out between the factions in your city as the "climax." To surmount this obstacle, I had to ... build two prisons in a housing district and throw the rabble-rousers in jail. I was never in jeopardy, I had hundreds of thousands of resources stockpiled for the big storm that never came, and the game just ended. There was never an all-hands on deck existential crisis. It took about 9 hours, but if not for the time spent digging through the ****** UI and waiting on money income, it probably would have taken 4 hours tops.

The ui is garbage and the new system where you create place to place stuff.. and stuff is ****.

[Vergil]

Fartpunk Poo lol

[destinyhntr]

I am performing my public service by informing you all that this game is terrible. I wasn't a huge fan of the first game, but found it enjoyable for a single runthrough. I assumed the second one would also be worth a download since it dropped day one on PC gamepass. It's not.

Frostpunk 2 probably has the worst visual and UI design of any game I've ever played in my life. The graphics are pretty, but it's almost impossible to tell what's going on. Instead of building a "city" like the first game, you start off with the city you built last time as your central district (which you can't do much with), and you expand it by adding other districts around it. These other districts are things like housing, mining, etc., and they are made up of 6 hex tiles (that can be expanded to 9 or 12). You get bonuses for having 3 tiles of one district adjacent to 3 tiles from another district, so it's in your interest to lay them out in bizarre gerrymandered shapes and make it as messy as possible. You can also put up to two add-on buildings in each district (like putting a guardhouse in a housing district).

This is where it turns into a complete shitshow. The visuals are so cluttered that telling say...a food district from a housing district...isn't the easiest thing. Telling where one housing district ends and another begins isn't possible unless certain menus are open since the map shows no clear boundaries. And telling what buildings you have in each district is literally impossible unless you click around the amorphous boundaries of each individual district (that the mechanics encouraged you to make messy and intertwined with the others) to open its menu and see its building slots. And one would think that clicking the building slots for each districts menu would let you ... put buildings in them. No, of course not. You have to open a completely separate menu of buildings, scroll through to find the ones relevant to that district, and then look around on the map again to find the district you just had a menu open for. And keep in mind that you will frequently need to access these buildings to turn them on and off, which involves a meandering search every few minutes. It truly is developer incompetence of epic proportions.

Frostpunk 2 also falls prey to long stretches where you have nothing to do, because everything in the game requires money ("heatstamps") to build or research, and you cannot build anything that increases your money supply. The obvious thing would be to let the player build happy merchant districts, but instead you are constrained by (and the game is substantially lengthened by) being completely dependent on a meager passive income of money. You can harrass each population faction to pay you a tribute, but that can only be done once a year, so your income is very capped. This means a lot of sitting around waiting while your resource stockpiles are overflowing and you have hordes of idle workers, because you cannot build structures to put them to work without money.

Lastly, the campaign is just bad, and beating the cold has become almost irrelevant. Spoilers will follow.

► Show Spoiler

The big storm at the end of Frostpunk 1 was pretty cool because it made you feel like you might lose. Temperatures dropped, people were freezing and dying, sacrifices had to be made. There is nothing really like that in Frostpunk 2. After a tutorial scenario and then getting dropped in your real base and building it up a bit, you get a warning that a storm is coming. The storm came, nobody ever got cold, no tough decisions needed to be made, but my resources got sort of low and I was thinking "not bad for an intro to the blizzard mechanic, could get cool later in the game." Except it wasn't an "intro" to the mechanic. That was the storm. The remainder of the game consisted of anticlimaxes -- building an outpost to mine "cores" to upgrade your heat generator (except you don't need an upgraded generator for anything because you just beat the only storm in the game with an un-upgraded generator. You do that and then some "civil war" breaks out between the factions in your city as the "climax." To surmount this obstacle, I had to ... build two prisons in a housing district and throw the rabble-rousers in jail. I was never in jeopardy, I had hundreds of thousands of resources stockpiled for the big storm that never came, and the game just ended. There was never an all-hands on deck existential crisis. It took about 9 hours, but if not for the time spent digging through the ****** UI and waiting on money income, it probably would have taken 4 hours tops.

That's a shame. I enjoyed the first game and was looking forward to the second improving on it. Let's hope Silksong doesn't disappoint too (though I don't have my hopes up).