Review for Frost Punk. PC game, the video game came out on 24/04/2018
Year 1886, London is paralyzed by frost, 80 survivors of this hell of snow and ice decide to go to a coal generator, which should ensure adequate heating for their needs; on their arrival, however, they find the generator turned off and no one waiting for them, so they will have to roll up their sleeves to turn it on and not go towards an icy end.
With this incipit begins Frostpunk, the new title of the Polish 11 bit studios, former developers of This War of Mine, available for PC on the Steam platform; Frostpunk is a product that cannot be contained in a single category, it is in fact both a city-builder and a survival.
The main objective is therefore survival, to guarantee it you will have to make sure that your generator is (possibly) always operational and feed your citizens. The antagonist of our survivors, the frost, is a sneaky enemy as in the early stages of the main story, temperatures will drop and recover within a few days of play, while during the later stages the temperatures will drop and continue to drop , forcing us to multiply our efforts in the production and storage of coal and to improve the thermal insulation of the workplaces and homes of our citizens.
The resources of the game are divided into three macro areas: food, heating and development materials. The heating is guaranteed by the main generator (and by other mini reactors that may be created later), to keep the reactor operational it will therefore be necessary to extract coal from the mines and, to a lesser extent, the transformation of wood into coal. The food is divided into ready-to-eat rations and raw food, the latter having to be hunted by teams of hunters or, continuing with the research, through the (very small) crop in greenhouses. Development materials are timber and steel that you will need to create buildings and roads.
The city develops in concentric circles with the generator as a point of origin, the further you move away from it, the more it will lose its effectiveness; with the cold the illness of your citizens will come and, if not quickly treated by means of special buildings, death, thus depriving you of vital manpower for the survival of your city. After building a beacon, we will have the opportunity to create teams of explorers who will have the task of researching outposts, resources and a possible cause for the wave of frost. One of the most important discoveries your explorers will be able to make is the discovery of steam engines . These very rare engines are a very useful resource for the creation of semi-automated structures, such as infirmaries or mines. Exploration takes time and often tests us with moral choices, in fact in many outposts we will find survivors that we can guide to our settlement. With the growth in the number of our citizens, the resources to be used for their maintenance will also increase.
In addition to the practical guide of our citizens, we will also be asked to guide them morally, for example we will be able to choose whether to use children as a workforce in each production site or if instead they remain in a structure dedicated to them: each of our choices will have a a consequence that will impact one of the two indicators, the hope or discontent of the population. In the advanced stages of the game we will be able to direct citizens towards the search for hope through faith or the reduction of discontent through a kind of "police state". The choice of one of the two moral lines to follow will preclude the other, thus guaranteeing a different playability in the next playthrough.
Graphically, Frostpunk is almost flawless; the game runs on Liquid Engine, proprietary engine from 11 bit studios, first created in 2010 for Anomaly Warzone Earth. The design of the structures draws heavily from the steampunk imaginary, then the Victorian England style is combined with pipes and metal constructions moved by steam engines, all stylistically very fascinating. All the elements of your glacial mini-world are well made and manicured; special mention for the area of the main generator, the real heart of your town. The atmospheric / physical effects are also triple-A titled; the management of smoke and light effects is excellent. The shadows that will change during the day / night cycle and the progressive freezing of the city structures as the temperature drops the city with lots of glacial lines on the screen are those little touches of class that every player can appreciate.
To counteract, however, the excessive presence of these graphic elements that slightly burdens the user interface and will often force you to rotate the camera to prevent the blanket of smoke from bothering the view, these small defects in any case do not absolutely affect the playability. . The graphic realization of the world outside your town is very sparse and leaves a lot to the imagination of the player, a real shame as a better care of the external environments would certainly have helped the player's identification even more.
The difficulty of the game is very high for the first run of the main story, once completed you will have the opportunity to change the difficulty level. A small sore point concerns the longevity of the game: to complete the main campaign we didn't even take 6 hours, restarting a couple of times after some unsuccessful experiences; the same number of hours are required for the other two scenarios present (plus a third arriving). Note also the total absence of localization, both for the dialogues and for the texts on the screen.
Frostpunk is undoubtedly a very well done title. 11 bit studios worked (as usual) on human material management and moral choices flawlessly. Despite some small flaws, which would have led the title to reach new heights of excellence, I would highly recommend Frostpunk, not only to city builder lovers or to those who already know the works of 11 bit studios, but also to those players in love with survival. who want to get out of the cliches of the genre.
► Frostpunk is a Simulation-Survival game developed and published by 11 bit studios for PC, the video game was released on 24/04/2018
