Recent reviews by doober

For starters, I played the original Frostpunk for 250+ hours, easy to say I'm a big fan of the game. Before I first played Frostpunk 2, I didn't watch any gameplay before it officially released so I could experience it by myself. In the first couple hours of the game I was shocked at how different FP2 was compared to the first, which I initially didn't like. However, I stuck with it for longer and ended up being really invested in the mechanics and story of the game. Here are some thoughts I have of my first playthrough of the game:

The scope (population, frostland, society, etc) is bigger and less intimate, but it is still faithful to Frostpunk's survival formula of hazardous weather, resource struggles, and a (much expanded) tech progression tree. The main innovation of the game is the political / faction system which makes signing new laws more complex. Some factions support a law, others are against it, so you may have to compromise to achieve these goals. If you aren't a fan of democracy as a form of governance in New London, rest assured you can always become a dictator... to a certain extent! This new system is very fun to me and just adds more replayability to the base game. However, there still are some things that could be improved in my opinion, such as the abilities; I spent a long time trying to figure out where I can activate abilities like "recruit more guards." I figured it out eventually but it was still annoying. The tech tree is pretty overwhelming; I feel like the tree format should be tweaked to better separate the different ideas of opposing factions (ie. make them more apparent / distinct). Also, I feel like once you research one faction's tech you shouldn't be able to research the opposing one's tech. For instance, it seems redundant to me to have two different kinds of oil extractors in the same playthrough even if you wanted to appease both factions. There are some minor glitches here and there: sometimes the resource display disappears, which I fix by reloading the game, and the autosave function is pretty laggy, but nothing game-breaking. I'll end this review with a big positive, one of my favorite things about the game by far is the MUSIC. It was well composed and did an outstanding job of portraying the world of Frostpunk all over again in a more sinister tone.

In my opinion, there are many pros and few cons to FP2. For those of you who are hesitant to buy because it is different from the original, I urge you to give it a try regardless. It is faithful to the original game and expands upon many aspects that made FP1 amazing, albeit less intimately. The game is well-made and you can tell that the developers poured their heart into it, just like the first game.

The matchmaking system is broken. My friend and I are gold nova master and played with two silvers and even an unranked player. Sometimes when we were in mg2 we would go against GOD-tier gold novas who were obviously a smurf account. But that's not the only problem. Almost a third of our matches contain either an obvious cheater or a smurf account. You can't expect anyone to rank up and have fun when every match is like this. It seems like valve isn't doing anything to fix matchmaking which is sad. Can't recommend.