Frostpunk 2

After a long wait, Frostpunk 2 has finally made its way to consoles, and it proves to be well worth it. While the strategy genre has traditionally drawn a smaller audience on consoles, Frostpunk 2 delivers an engrossing survival experience that is more than capable of keeping players engaged for countless hours.

Frostpunk 2 is plagued with classic symptoms of a PC-to-console port. The text was too small. Objects on the screen were difficult to distinguish. The controls were confusing, with major UI elements were sporadically accessible to me until trial and error finally showed me the way. Sure, I wasn’t hunched over a desktop, but I discovered heretofore unknown ways of putting cricks in my neck in order to read the tiny text littered across my screen. Occasionally, I blinked and realized I had been standing directly in front of my TV for several minutes. In a possible record-breaking first, I found myself repeatedly wishing for a PlayStation Portal. I also lost reasonable amounts of progress to in-game crashes. I took it as a chance to fix mistakes I’d made, but didn’t save more frequently, though. Especially in the game’s later hours, the process just took too long. Every settlement was clearly always running in the background, slowing the whole thing down. Still, even this port can’t keep me away. I’m already ready to brave the frost again.

Frostpunk 2 remains one of the most compelling city builders and survival games in recent memory, and it's survived the transition to console in remarkably strong form. That said, if you have the option of playing on PC, that remains the best place to play.

While the real-time strategy aspects of the city-building gameplay run into natural difficulties in the transition from mouse-and-keyboard to a controller, the execution of Frostpunk 2‘s story is enough to lure players back time and time again. The depth of the worldbuilding ensures the campaign can play out in several different ways, all dependent on the player’s choices amid tough situations. The result is an engrossing strategy game that’s hard to put down, even when the controls become frustrating.

The icy hellscape of Frostpunk 2 translates surprisingly well to Sony's sleek console. The PlayStation 5 occasionally has hiccups, and the DualSense controller is far from ideal for a strategy game this intricate, but the game does a brilliant job patching over these issues to let you enjoy a strong narrative experience. I got to build what I thought were thriving civilizations, and then watch them fall apart through my own shortsightedness. Frostpunk 2 is a beautiful, honest depiction of how far humanity can go when survival is the only ambition, and it makes my multiple political downfalls worth living.