Honest review - must read

[press123]

I’m reading the posts on this forum and I can’t believe it. This is some kind of troll attack (Black PR) by people who haven’t played the game at all.
Regarding optimization and game performance – I have a 5-year-old gaming laptop that lags in many new games. Here, I have no issues with performance whatsoever.
Someone somewhere wrote that the story mode can be completed in 5 hours. That is an absolute lie. In that time, you can at best get into the details.
Frostpunk 2 is the same old 11 bit studios in their best form. As good as with This War of Mine or Frostpunk 1. Maybe my review is short (I’m happy to write more on Friday), but sorry – I have to get back to playing.
And you trolls, just give it a rest

[wildgoose]

I don't think people are lying about performance issues generally. I'm having some jittery stuff but it's not unplayable. A lot of people either didn't watch any videos about the game beforehand or they're just deliberately ignoring that it was clearly advertised as a different game. Nearly every reviewer I've watched made it abundantly clear that this is more focused on politics and resource management and less on low level citybuilding and gathering.

[Arnesio]

Originally posted by press123:

I’m reading the posts on this forum and I can’t believe it. This is some kind of troll attack (Black PR) by people who haven’t played the game at all.
Regarding optimization and game performance – I have a 5-year-old gaming laptop that lags in many new games. Here, I have no issues with performance whatsoever.
Someone somewhere wrote that the story mode can be completed in 5 hours. That is an absolute lie. In that time, you can at best get into the details.
Frostpunk 2 is the same old 11 bit studios in their best form. As good as with This War of Mine or Frostpunk 1. Maybe my review is short (I’m happy to write more on Friday), but sorry – I have to get back to playing.
And you trolls, just give it a rest

my pc is 10 years old and it runs great.

[Rime Pendragon]

Also sometimes paradoxically games run worse on newer hardware.

[BrainDrain]

I got lil performance issues but 1% fps generally is not going below 40 while stable fps is 55-60. Also there is a minor problem with texture downloading in cutscenes even on m2 ssd.
But I like the game, there is no unfixable cons for me

[DaggerOtto740]

I think some people clearly have something like buyers remorse about how much money they spent on their hardware like spending upwards of $2200+ just for a 4090 (Depending on country) and not getting what they perceive to be enough fps for that price. Because im lucky enough to have a high end system now (Easily capable of 80-90fps on ultra and ultrawide 1440p) and still remember playing games with my laptop and every game I had to turn down the settings to low just to get 30fps. Also people are allergic to turning down the settings from ultra to high like they can even notice the difference when in game.

[_APA [~sudo]]

https://youtu.be/jm6EQK9QksU

[Monsieur Bambi]

Im able to play it on ultra 4k with about 130-140 fps at all times, i havent had that much time to play and make a large city. But it seems pretty good optimized, then again. Their preview they showed has the same specs as my pc. So I guess having AMD cpu and gpu for once is a nice thing.

People complaining about performance is probably right. There are so many different specs you can have that its impossible to optimize a game towards all of them. You might have a bottleneck in your system somewhere, who knows.

Just because you dont have problems doesnt mean others dont :D
Just be happy the game runs fine on your system

[Quill]

Originally posted by press123:

I’m reading the posts on this forum and I can’t believe it. This is some kind of troll attack (Black PR) by people who haven’t played the game at all.
Regarding optimization and game performance – I have a 5-year-old gaming laptop that lags in many new games. Here, I have no issues with performance whatsoever.
Someone somewhere wrote that the story mode can be completed in 5 hours. That is an absolute lie. In that time, you can at best get into the details.
Frostpunk 2 is the same old 11 bit studios in their best form. As good as with This War of Mine or Frostpunk 1. Maybe my review is short (I’m happy to write more on Friday), but sorry – I have to get back to playing.
And you trolls, just give it a rest

I mean, currently, I adore the game. It does however run like ♥♥♥♥ on my current PC. As for speed of completion? Honestly it's not far off the mark. I finished my first playthrough in about 6-7ish hours and that was with me taking so long to over-prepare my people actually got annoyed with me for it.

[press123]

This is not just about optimalisation, also about how long does it take to beat the story mode. 5 hours, some of people say, but… how this is even possible?

[ArcadeVault]

I have no problem with other games, but FP 2 just start being problematic on the audio side after a while. Its getting noisy, like all the audio layer stumbling into each other and its just go into a very bad radio source... totally annoying.

Also, the game sometimes freezes for 10 sec.

So, i definitely have performance issues. On the other hand, iam not even trying to say, i have a new computer, but i usually dont have any issue with other games.

[Legion495]

Ah with the release they gonna get metrics and will start to fix stuff.
Would not sweat it.

[Dnopps]

Originally posted by ArcadeVault:

I have no problem with other games, but FP 2 just start being problematic on the audio side after a while. Its getting noisy, like all the audio layer stumbling into each other and its just go into a very bad radio source... totally annoying.

Also, the game sometimes freezes for 10 sec.

So, i definitely have performance issues. On the other hand, iam not even trying to say, i have a new computer, but i usually dont have any issue with other games.

That is the only main issue I'm having. After awhile the audio starts to stutter or get radio static-like.

[Ele]

Ok, so my review (thanks OP for a thread lol). I had no issues on my system, it's rather high end. So this is purely gameplay review in and of itself.

The story... wow. I loved the story. It was far more detailed than we had in FP, and really gave me a sense of where the city was at.

The struggle, was real, but not in the way that FP was. Materials, I'm just gonna say it are a right PITA. Materials are supposedly needed to do repairs, but if you don't have a full stockpile of them, they demand prefabs for repairs. What? If you are running a deficit with 150k in stockpile, you have to use prefabs to repair as well. This is just a broken mechanic in my book considering the low quantity you get of prefabs from your industrial district and your central district if you have the law enacted. Heat, not really that much of a problem. At the end of my gameplay, I had 140 unhoused, and yeah, sure I had cold going on, but no major deaths. I had a hospital in one of my districts and it tended everyone. So literally, if it was warmer than -60, I didn't care about housing my people. Goods are just another "struggle" bone to induce crime. I ran always in the deficit, and while I never really get it below 30 in deficit, put a couple of watchtowers in, and boom, problem solved for crime.

Moral dilemmas *sigh*. These just didn't exist. That need to try to balance your desire to be a dictator (already short fused by the Council and former Captain), gave you no real moral dilemma. The tutorial... my choices: Let the Elders sacrifice themselves and club baby seal brains. I sacrificed the Elders, saved the seals. But there was truly no "bad" result of that other than a quick pop up from a girl who was going to miss grandma telling her stories of the old days. No twinge of regret on my part. Grandma volunteered, I took her up on it. I had the choice of saving the children in my mine when it set on fire, or sacrifice them to save the coal. I sacrificed them. I get a pop up from one of the brothers telling me he missed his sister, but she would have given her life for the city. Decision rewarded.

The moral dilemmas are part of what define 11Bit as a studio in so many ways. How far are you willing to go to survive? How far will you go to ensure the City doesn't fall? Chapter 5, I finished in less than an hour. How do I know? I ordered lunch when I had to make the decision of banishment, becoming captain or trying to solve the differences. I had victory 5 minutes after my food was delivered, a total of 40 minutes.

The music! I'm listening to it right now as I write it and getting ready to try Utopia play through. I felt it was missing throughout the game. The first Whiteout (ok, ONLY whiteout), I really wanted that feel from New Home where it mingled with the howling wind and you sat tight praying you were gonna make it. I felt the music was just plain missing throughout the game. I heard it during the Civil War, and a few other "dire" times, otherwise it was completely absent.

I am going to do several playthroughs as I saw different paths to do things, which I'm quite looking forward to. And I hope the DLC's we get down the road, address the moral dilemma issue a bit better, as it feels lacking in that area, which I think also makes people feel disconnected from their citizens. Yeah, we're the Steward, but emotionally, I felt zilch for the most part. Especially as I was not even remotely emotionally attached to the laws that were there to select, not even the Rule laws.

Overall, I'd give it a 6/10. It was DEFINiTELY a sequel to the original in all the storyline ways, and I loved that part of it. I loved the little bits of people who gave you information about the laws you had just passed, although I really didn't care which way or another to go. I adored zooming in and seeing the residents working in an area. I LOVED the large map for my scouts. I greatly enjoyed the tie-ins back to FP of the original locations, that was very nicely done. And I will definitely enjoy my time in it as I try different endings, etc.

But those are my overall thoughts after doing my first run on Normal mode (next mode from Citizen).

[Sverd]

Originally posted by wildgoose:

I don't think people are lying about performance issues generally. I'm having some jittery stuff but it's not unplayable. A lot of people either didn't watch any videos about the game beforehand or they're just deliberately ignoring that it was clearly advertised as a different game. Nearly every reviewer I've watched made it abundantly clear that this is more focused on politics and resource management and less on low level citybuilding and gathering.

My experience as well playing on a 4 year old mid-high end desktop. Game never crashed through my campaign but especially as the campaign progressed it got very jittery and stuttered/froze a couple of times. Not unplayable, not catastrophic, but the performance issues are there. It's honestly not that bad though, I'd expect over the course of the next year 11 bit will iron out these hiccups.

Edit: Story is definitely very short though. 5 hours is not far off. I completed in about 7-8 hours a full playthrough (steam time is about 10 but I had it in the background a lot). The campaign is currently quite short, they will probably expand it with DLCs.

[erik_ironfist]

Originally posted by Ele:

The struggle, was real, but not in the way that FP was... Heat, not really that much of a problem. At the end of my gameplay, I had 140 unhoused, and yeah, sure I had cold going on, but no major deaths. I had a hospital in one of my districts and it tended everyone. So literally, if it was warmer than -60, I didn't care about housing my people. Goods are just another "struggle" bone to induce crime. I ran always in the deficit, and while I never really get it below 30 in deficit, put a couple of watchtowers in, and boom, problem solved for crime.

Well they do recommend that if you played Frostpunk 1, you should select Officer difficulty or higher, because otherwise you'll find the game to be too easy.