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Whenever I tell people I like to play management games & city builders, I very often get the reaction "oh, have you played Frostpunk then?" even by people unfamiliar with the genre. Coincidentally, Frostpunk is a game I refused to play for a very long time, because everything I hear about it make it sound like a very hard game of survival and. Well. I don't like hard games. I like to win at things.

But hey, the game was on sale, and people also kept talking of Against The Storm as this impossibly hard thing when it's now one of my favorite games ever, so who knows! Let's try it out.

The gimmick of Frostpunk is as follow: you manage a colony of survivors in the middle of a steampunk ice age. Your sole savior on this bitch of an earth is the gigantic heat generator in the middle of the town you're trying to build. You're gonna have to manage food, obviously, but aso and most importantly fuel, to keep this bitch running and ensure no one freezes to death. You also have to manage the population morale (the "hope" and "discontent" bars) as if the population runs too unhappy they will murder you. Crueler laws will make things easier for you to survive, but will tank morale, so balance this shit out.

That's the theory, at least. Frostpunk does not have a tutorial tab. If you want to learn the mechanics, you jump straight into the main story chapter, which will give you some beginner quests like "get coal" "build a hunter hut" "feed everyone." That is normally something I tend to praise in management games. Indeed, separate tutorials are often boring as fuck, and I like to play games to play games, not to have a seminar on fictional mechanics.

I will not praise Frostpunk for this however, because the way this tutorial is built is shit. When I say the quest is "get coal", I mean it literally is "get coal" and nothing else. No "do xyz thing and click on this button to get coal!" Now, I don't mind the lack of handholding for things that are common sense (ie I don't mind if a tutorial doesn't include "click on the arrows to move the cameras!" because you can safely assume anyone who has played even one video game in their life would know how to do that.) Getting ressources, however, is a different mechanic for every single game out there. (Against the Storm requires specific buildings close to the ressources to harvest them, for instance, while Dawn of Man requires you to click on the ressource and say "harvest".) I saw the building menu has the option for collector huts or whatever. Naturally, I assumed that meant I had to build those to collect ressources nearby. But nope! That was the wrong way! And I had to restart like four times because I completely fucked up the basics and half my population died on day one. That's not "being a challenging and fun game." This is just bad.

In general, the game is really fucking bad at explaining its mechanics to you. There are so many times where, even in the late game, I passed a law or researched a thing, thought it was active and working, and then later learned that no I had to click on a button hidden somewhere for it to take effect. There are tons of mechanics I unlocked and never used because I wasn't aware of how and where I could activate it. And there are tons of other mechanics I had to look up online because there's just. Nothing on them. Are children as effective workers as adults? (yes) can children get hurt if they work? (No, a kid getting hurt after you pass the law on child labor is a scripted thing) What happens if you set down a building, do people who work on building it not work in the meantime? Do you need free hands to build shit? (No idea, I couldn't find an answer to that one.) This is just embarrassing at this point man.

I think Frostpunk does live up to its reputation as a hard game (specifically it's a game with a huge emphasis on time management and getting x things done before y event happens) but a fair bit of that reputation comes from artificial difficulty in my opinion. Yeah if you don't tell me all the tools I have to achieve my goal of course I'm gonna underperform you fucking idiot. There were also a lot of times I had to restart my game because early decisions I made fucked me up lategame. That's not necessarily a bad mechanic to have, but a lot of time to me this came less as "this is a game about taking calculated risks" and more as "this is a game about dying and retrying until you learn all the traps it's going to throw at you."

Honestly I think a big problem with Frostpunk is that the tutorial/story all takes place in a single main story chapter. In most management game with a campaign mode of sort, you're given multiple shorter missions that each introduce new mechanics to you until you know enough to get the ball rolling: Caesar III gives you first a short campaign on housing, then another on food/water/trades, and then starts throwing the real challenges at you while introducing the more complicated mechanics. Against The Storm on easy more only requires you to do the bare minimum, allowing you to fuck around and get familiar with it, until each difficulty level forces you out of your comfort zone to learn new mechanics you've ignored until now. Frostpunk should have had something similar, instead of "here is everything at once, and if you fucked your early game you're dead lol."

Anyways. Tutorial (or lack of thereof) aside, the main campaign is pretty cool. There's an actual story to this game, can you believe? I liked it. That part was cool.

There are side campaigns too, also with cool stories and fun challenges. I respect what they tried to do with those. Personally I didn't understand shit and I keep losing on day 3 (those seed containers are outside the range of the generator and apparently the smaller coal furnaces only mildly warm them up, so I don't know physically how I'm supposed to win that one.) (As for Winterhome everyone gets sick and die on day 4 so that's also very much "idk what you guys want from me here.") But on principle I like the idea and I figure someone more stubborn than me would enjoy them.

Aside from that, there's the endless mode. You got the hard version (fewer ressources and random penalties) or the easy version (more ressources and a warmer climate.) I think there's a total of like, eight unique maps? Four from the story modes + four other ones. That's... not much. Caesar III had 20 in story mode alone.

Speaking of not much, you know what else there is not much to do? Actual city building. If you guys read my other management game reviews, you know I like when these games have a sense of progression: I have to do x so I can unlock y so I can do z. In Caesar III I need to build housing and then the food + base safety shit and then I can start dabbling in entertainment and education. In Frostpunk, most of that sense of progression comes from "we need more coal to heat up the generator more so we can survive colder temp drop." Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but that also means that once you got your coal mines you just kinda. Build more coal mines. And then optimize the coal mines. I won in the main story mode with a population of like 25 cuz I just made automatons for everything and optimized my coal mines to hell and back. There's no real reason to build anything else or accept any new population after that. There's a very limited amount of things actually worth doing in this game. If you hit a stable hope/discontent ratio then you're basically good.

This review sounds very negative I'm aware, but frankly this game isn't bad but it definitely isn't for me. If I'm looking for a challenging survival city builder, I find Against The Storm much better in every aspect. There's just nothing in here. I finished the main story and I thought it was cool and now I've got nothing to use my "finally learned all the mechanics" skill on because there are only four story chapters and two of them don't interest me, and there are only 4 maps for the endless mode and playing them on easy is boring as hell. There's nothing here.