The City Builder genre has been dominated by a handful of franchises like Age of Empires and City Skylines for quite a few years now. Frostpunk by polish studio 11 Bit is the latest addition to that basket. Frostpunk meshes survival and city-building elements to make one of the best games of it’s kind. Remember that game, “This War of Mine” which became popular on mobile devices. Frostpunk is by the same people.
Frostpunk is quite similar to, “This War of Mine”. Both games have a post apocalyptic theme with survival elements. While Frostpunk focuses on city building, the latter is more of a resource collection and management sim. Frostpunk puts the player at the head of a community struggling to make ends meet in the freezing cold of the arctic. A cylindrical generator at the center of the settlement is most vital to survival as the frost shows no signs of letting up.
Frostpunk: A Brutal Survival City Builder
With that out of the way, let’s talk about the mechanics. Frostpunk takes the survival part of the game a step further, and here your people need to be protected from the cold as well. The generator is the key here, upgrading it as the population rises is essential. Despite that people will regularly fall ill, and if you don’t treat them in a med-house they will die. Unlike other resource management simulators where the game ends when all your inhabitants die, Frostpunk adopts a rather harsh system. Here there are two bars, namely hope and discontent that you need you manage. If hope falls to zero, the game ends, no matter how many people are alive and how much you’ve done for them.
Realism and Planning
To enhance realism, the resources like wood and coal lying around in the open get depleted after a while, after which you are supposed to build coal mines and the like. Scouts are also an essential part of surviving Frostpunk, as they may find a lot of precious resources out there without much effort.
Frostpunk: Flaws and Conslusion
I really have no complaints here. Although, I do think that this game is a bit too tough but I suppose that was intended. Furthermore, the events aren’t randomly generated. They are scripted, so the same ones are triggered every time you play the game. This leaves little to no room for replaying any particular scenario. That is perhaps the only fault with this game.