Recent reviews by Microcosm The Catboy

This game is like Frostpunk 2, but it has enjoyable mechanics and you actually feel attached to your city. 2024 Predecessor of the year.

The most unenjoyable "city builder" I have played in years, even considering its a 3 day early access. It is a travesty to even consider this is related to Frostpunk. It is a spin off. The only similarity this has with the original game is that they're in the same universe.

The entire time I played this, I was comparing it to the original, and even reinstalled Frostpunk just to make sure I wasn't wrong. I put 3x the amount of time into Frostpunk over the past 2 days than I did playing this 3 day early access.

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Lets start with the graphics. There is nothing notably better than Frostpunk 1 (FP1). The only thing I noticed is that FP2 is horribly optimized, leading to regular lag spikes and average frame rate below 60 fps on medium graphics.

Update: I wrote this in google docs yesterday and just to prove a point before posting, just for this game I decided to repair my computer that has a 4090 and i9-14900KF. With V-Sync enabled, constant lag, sub 60 fps. With DLSS and Frame Gen on, V-Sync off, I got a little above 60. I don't know how they managed to do this. Almost top of the line PC and still struggles.

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Next is the buildings. In FP1 you built buildings but in FP2 you draw districts. After placing these districts you can place a single building on it to increase output at the expense of using more workers, but its the only way to actually get large amounts of resources. You can expand a district to house ONE additional building. The housing district needs to be expanded to have a building, and can only support one. The game encourages you to plan your cities by having different districts give proximity debuffs. It is awful.

If the city building was rather just placing buildings on hexagonal grids with proximity debuffs, or free form district drawing, I would probably have no issues, but this system is simply ghoulish to play with and not enjoyable to me.

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Next is the scouts. Unlike FP1, FP2 requires you to "frostbreak" (excavate) to the border of the map to build a logistics district. This will give you 15 "Frostland Teams". These are your scouts. Rather than have singular scout teams that can go everywhere, FP2 has turned it into a resource meaning some undiscovered areas will require more Frostland Teams than others to go to. There is also a new danger system for exploring that is useless as you can just research to decrease the danger.

This system is flawed, but not really bad. Just needs some numbers tweaked to balance it out.

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Similar to FP1 Settlements, FP2 has outposts, settlements, and colonies. Outposts are found with your Frostland Teams, and can have a trade route established using some resources and your Frostland Teams. Outposts can be upgraded into Settlements for more Frostland Teams and resources. It will also take some population to construct it. The downside to Outposts and Settlements is that they have very limited amount of resources before they run out.

Colonies are mini cities that you can actually build in and trade resources with. They're used for getting more resources from other locations after you run out in your main city. They are essentially resource depots. You can also shuttle your populations between them if you need more workers in the colony vs city.

I don't like or hate the Outposts and Settlements, but I COMPLETELY adore Colonies. They are the most enjoyable aspect of the game by far.

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I'm not even going to bother explaining resources because I'm simply too dumb to. I don't hate the new system but I hate the resource balance and how buildings are required if you want to not immediately fall apart.

I will say this though. Heatstamps are required for every building and district in the game. You gain them passively from people living in the city, and this number can be increased by producing ample amounts of goods. It is the worst "addition" as it literally is just there to impede progress. It is similar to the hospital death spiral in FP1. If you go into a deficit while not having enough goods and you can't get heatstamps quick enough, its game over. I found that 230 weeks in.

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That is all I can remember of what I would personally like to completely forget. I would add more but I've largely forgotten and will not be relaunching until at least the first patch. I don't hate this because it's different or new. I did like the outposts, but thats it.

The best game I can compare this to in recent memory is Sins of a Solar Empire II. The planetary buildings and poor resource collection is very similar to Frostpunk II in my opinion.

Game is definitely amazing, but will only appeal to the few rather than the many.

Modern computers are too good to run this now. Community patches/mods are the only way to enjoy this relic. I just discovered I can't even use save games due to "compression errors", don't understand what that means or how I can't load a file.

If your players can't run it, you shouldn't be selling it.

It still gets updated weekly. Puts other early access game devs to shame.

If you have friends, genuinely an insanely fun game. It sadly suffers from being early access and having childish adults.

Major performance issues. Even on medium settings I get low frames and stuttering. The display is also fairly broken. If I alt tab, theres a chance that huge ugly patches will show up on the screen making the game quite literally unplayable.

The game was fun to play a few years ago but its impossible for me to even spend more than an hour in it now with how the performance has worsened.

GTX 4090,
i14900KF
SN 850X 4 TB
96 GB of RAM

Despite having top of the line specs, it takes a full calendar year to create/load a game. How does a 2D airport tycoon take 2+ minutes to load an empty map.

If a game has to boast about releasing a "free update", its not a good game.

290$ in dlc's + base game and you don't even get all of the units and heroes. To get the rest you need to make a "free" CA account for the "free" heroes after also buying the corresponding DLC, but since the heroes and units are tied up behind steam keys they're in "limited supply" even though steam doesn't charge when you create steam keys. To add insult to injury the 30th anniversary units will permanently remain locked in your unit roster for 5 different races as they've "run out of keys" (its literally free to make them).

The DLC's are overpriced and mandatory for a complete game experience, similar to HOI IV and Stellaris. If the Heroes and Units are free, then why not just add them to the corresponding DLC rather than force people to register for a website that has no other reason for existing than to steal consumer data.

Buy this from a third party for cheap. Don't support Creative Assembly and their uncreative methods of scamming their players.