Review - FROSTPUNK - Global cooling is real!
Frostpunk is an overly ambitious survival-RTS with a very unique setting.
Taking place in a fictional steampunk town, you have to help a community of frozen-ass survivors rebuilding their tiny society after the "global cooling" event, in a permanent blizzard and increasingly precarious conditions.
Get ready, has hell really has frozen over. Adapt or perish in the ruins of your civilization.
| Store | Platform | OVERALL RATING: 87% |
| Buy it on GOG Buy on Steam |
PC |
+ THE POSITIVE
- Enjoyable story- Very solid gameplay - Easy to learn - The laws, which drastically change the way your city evolves - Interesting graphic style, but don't forget your chapka!
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THE NEGATIVE
- Limited replayability and not enough content- Not enough laws and random events, and only two ways to develop your colony (faith or order) - No sandbox mode |
THE STORY - FROZEN STEAMPUNK To be specific, Frostpunk is a society-survival-city-builder-RTS game, although the city building features are pretty simple. And it's not completely real-time, since it can be paused. In a nutshell, it's complicated.😄
In an alternative steampunk 19th century, the apocalypse took the form of an eternal snowstorm. Oh, joy. (Yep, you can put in a trunk the blue bikini you just got in Shantae: Half-Genie Hero!)
Right in the middle of England being swept by the blizzard, a bunch of survivors found refuge in the middle of a crater, and installed a giant boiler, which will allow them to survive.
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| -30°C. I see that the boiler is working well. How about building some hooters bar instead, it'll get men hot in no time! Oh... Yeah, I forgot. -30°C. Girls wearing 3 layers of grizzli fur aren't sexy. |
That's where the game starts and asks you to take decisions and manage your minions-I mean citizens.
This is no Dungeon Keeper. Or is it?
One thing's sure, survival of what’s left of humanity depends on your decisions,
and some of them will be unpopular to say the least.
A positive note, the tutorial section is integrated into the campaign as well as the scenarios,
a rare feature we always welcome in the RTS genre!
GAMEPLAY - SURVIVING AGAINST ALL ODDS 💪
The first days, you'll focus on sending your workforce to collect the minimum subsistence in
the surrounding deposits: coal to supply the furnace, wood to build
some shelters, a hunter's hut to feed your hungry slaves or a medical post
for the sick, a workshop to obtain new technologies, etc. Very early, you'll realize that cold will become your worst enemy, and you'll cautiously place each building around the big boiler, ensuring that it is constantly fed so that the heat can spread, otherwise you'll risk the penalty of seeing all of your workers bedridden, and even frozen in their sleep.
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| The "industrial hothouse" is not a nudie bar for robots, it's the fully upgraded version of the basic hothouse, used for agriculture. I built it right above the ruins of a radioactive waste site and now, we have fantastic watermelon-sized cherries. Told you I would fix the hunger problem! Of course, most of our children have three arms now, but think of their potential as metal guitarists! |
Then, you'll improve your town with heaters, ore extractors, "superinsulated" houses, and eventually, you'll even have the possibility to build bars to cheer up your unfortunate citizens!
DO NOT forget to send scouts beyond your crater, as they will try to loot the surrounding areas, or even escort abandoned refugees to our base, thus nourishing the hope of rebuilding a civilization.
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| These beacons are used to send scouts! |
Yes, you're gonna have lots of things to manage!
Did we mention that every two or three days, the temperature drops by a dozen degrees, and it becomes a matter of life and death to struggle to keep the heating power at maximum efficiency, while making sure the furnace doesn't blow up in the process?
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| I love looking at snowy places. On a computer. From southern Europe. |
To make matters worse, you have to deal with the constantly changing morale of your people, which must be constantly balanced to achieve maximum efficiency.
It's up to you whether you'll achieve max efficiency with soft ways, or... harsher ways.
The system is well-thought and simple: Every 18 hours, you'll adopt a new law, which will modify in depths the town everyday's life.
These laws are varied(but a bit limited, unfortunately), and often force you to go through a dualist choice, between altruism and tyrannical pragmatism.
- Should we add sawdust to meals, to save some rations?
- Should children be allowed to build snowmen in peace, or have them work with adults to speed up production? (a very easy choice.)
- Should you accept to setup an armed militia that will make sure that people work as much as they can, even if it means breaking the bones of those who won't, Steven Seagal-style? (why is this so satisfying to watch?)
Every time you have to adopt a new law, the game gets increasingly difficult, multiplying the choices, which are as many potential missteps to question your authority.
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| Hey come on, I've heard that low carb diet is good for your heart! |
This is where the great strength of Frostpunk lies. It has an unique way of building tension(s?), linking climate issues and personal ethics. Not many games offered us that possibility.
After This War of Mine, 11 bit studios confirms once more that it likes to put the players in front of a controversial situation about survival, politics, and push them to their limits to see if they dare to cross the red line.
A very important difference with their previous game, though:
Because the story takes place in an "uchronic" universe, whatever significant impact your moral choices will have on the gameplay, they won't have the same emotional impact.
And anyway, the mechanics are so "ruthless" that we do not really have time to reflect on the scope of our actions, so we often choose the least restrictive method without qualms.
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| Aaaaah my ultimate dream, my very own propaganda center. I'll start by spreading fake news about the summer coming soon, just for laughs. |
Finally, a word about the rather short gameplay time, which does not exceed ten hours in the first campaign.
TIPS!
– Always keep an eye on your food AND coal production.– Don't underestimate the use of scouts! You'll eventually find outposts, giving you tons of resources, and again, the most important of all, COAL.
– Some techs aren't too useful, so we suggest to skip coal thumping and go for mining instead. Additionally, upgrade your resource factories as early as you can, and THEN your generators. Finally, you can upgrade your houses and scouts.
– If you have so much wood that it becomes useless, produce coal from it!
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| Although some people argue that Frostpunk is NOT a city builder at its core, it sure has a very decent amount of available buildings. |
Frostpunk eventually feels like a half-baked soufflé. It promises to show the horrors of surviving in a dystopia, but it doesn't go nearly as far as "This War of Mine".
Also, it's not very replayable. The game is very fun for some hours, maybe days.
Once you figure it out how it works, you can pretty much just carry on forever.
It's easy to master and once you beat it, you realize that the other scenarios don't offer much different. Nothing exciting.
An endless mode, more content, tech trees, and events/challenges would have helped...
However, thanks to a good difficulty balance, Frostpunk is still a model of spectacular strategy, and the actual current content it has to offer is very good and definitely worth it if you like this genre.👍
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| In Soviet England, work retires from you! |
GRAPHICS - GLOBAL WARMING? MY FROZEN ASS 🤒☃
While not being a stunning game, Frostpunk sure manages to catch your eye, depicting a somewhat realistic steampunk town lost in an immersive frozen atmosphere and constant blizzard.
The spectacle of this anthill at war against the elements remains a permanent fascination, endowed with an unique style.
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| Ahhhh summer in Iceland! |
Notes about optimization !
Frostpunk is quite demanding and will put a strain even on modern GPUs, depending on your resolution and how far your city has developed. You'll need something as strong as a Geforce GTX 1080.(and nope, we're not kidding.)Actually, regardless of your GPU, you'll experience some frame-rate issues when your city is fully developed.
Finally, the switch between normal and thermal vision mode will really take a toll on your FPS. Makes one wonder what kind of alien GPU the predator had in his helmet!
It's interesting to mention that Frostpunk is powered by 11 bit studios proprietary engine, "Liquid", which looks really great and runs quite smoothly.It should have been renamed "Frozen Liquid" for this game though. *slow claps*
There’s plenty of realistic animations on-screen, mainly your city child-I mean builders doing their best to work as fast as possible, or the smoke coming out of the buildings chimneys.
UI is great, and the developers did a fantastic job creating icons, hints, and plenty of various visual clues that help you navigate the screen.
You'll appreciate the Predator-like thermal vision, very helpful in highlighting the areas which require your attention, like the ones which require more steam hubs, or built-in heaters to counter the deadly blizzard effects on your buildings.
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| "Temperature: Freezing. Small risk of requiring an amputation." "Convince people to trust you again". Yeah. It's not going to be easy. |
MUSIC & SFX - HOPELESS AND HOPEFUL😞🔫😀🎉
The OST is uneven and while some tracks are truly epic odes to humanity and give that fleeting hope feeling, others are just too dark and depressing for their own good, giving you the impression that it's hopeless anyway and that what you're facing is way beyond your power.
Anyway, an OST which is best listened to during a sunny day in summer.🌞😁
Production is top-notch, though, comparable to the biggest budget AAA games out there.
Enjoy one of the best tracks of the OST =>
SFX are nothing to write home about.Just a constant convincing blizzard soundscape which gives you shivers even if you're in the coziness of your warm bedroom, and a few so-called "Steampunk" sounds (fzzt! bam! chtong!), when you build new constructions, etc.
There's a few voices, but most tutorials pages and instructions are completely silent, which doesn't really improve the already rather lifeless feeling of the game. If it's a deliberate choice, it's very efficient.😄👍
RATING BOX
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VERSION TESTED: 1.0.1
Publisher:
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| GRAPHICS: 84% | |
| Definitely, the dead and frozen land of Frostpunk won't please everybody. But if it's your style, you'll appreciate that it definitely depicts one of the most convincing frozen lands we've seen in a RTS. |
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| MUSIC: 85% | |
| A bit too depressing and sounding more like "all hope is lost RTS" than a "survival RTS", it still has some MAJOR epic pieces, supported by very professional production. | |
| SOUNDS: 70% | |
| SFX is either almost non-existent, or nothing to write home about. The few voices are perfectly decent. |
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| GAMEPLAY: 88% | |
| It's kinda addictive and very satisfying to have fun trying all the dozens laws(whether we choose an altruist or fascist path), which have a real impact on the way your people react, and the evolution of your town. Unfortunately, Frostpunk suffers from a lack of replayability, and a very necessary sandbox mode. | |
| OVERALL RATING: 87% | |
| Frostpunk's few minor flaws prevent it from being the megahit we were expecting. Nevertheless, it's still a very solid game, supported by original mechanics, and the haunting atmosphere it manages to immerse you into, thanks to its unique setting. If you're looking for a simple city-builder mixed with some time-management mechanics, sadistic laws and reforms, do not hesitate: It's one of the best RTS games of 2018. Let's just hope that 11 bit studios will bring us new content soon, and more importantly, an endless or "sandbox" mode! |
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