
FROSTPUNK 2
Having just successfully completed a playthrough (after 2-3 others that failed ) of the main story in Frostpunk 2, the first word that comes to mind to describe my condition is... exhaustion. If the highly emphasized survival elements of the first Frostpunk made it an original and quite unconventional city builder game, then Frostpunk 2 takes those special features and cranks them up to 11.
Indeed, between the freezing cold, gathering resources, exploration and maintaining the social cohesion of a people seeking salvation around the holy Generator, there's at times a feeling that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. But that's part of the magic of Frostpunk, and that magic is passed on perfectly in the sequel.

The main story of Frostpunk 2 takes place some 30 years after the events of the first game. The Frost still exists and New London, perhaps the last city on earth, still stands in spite of the dire circumstances. Not without its losses, however, as the city's Captain (the player character of the first game essentially) has been officially deposed from his position of authority, and has been replaced by the Steward (the new player character) who is tasked with leading New London into the future.
The conditions for this future are as expected: the coal supply that used to fuel the Generator is dwindling, the Frost continues to intensify, and the social groups that make up the city's population are in turmoil. As Steward, we are thus called upon to find the raw materials necessary for heat and general survival, to explore the frozen world around us, and to balance the needs and wants of New London's factions.

The 5+1 (including the prologue) chapters of the main story play the role of a tutorial for the game's basic functions. Perhaps the main gameplay difference compared to the first Frostpunk is that in FP2 we construct and manage entire districts at once instead of individual buildings. Which makes sense, I suppose, given that the scale of New London in FP2 is ten times larger and the population is now measured not in the hundreds but in the tens of thousands.
So for example instead of building roads and placing houses around them as in FP1, in FP2 we define an area as a Housing District and select the 6 hexes it will occupy on the map (after breaking the ice there via a separate function that costs resources), and once the construction is completed then the houses and roads and pipes etc. appear automatically at once. Districts in turn can be further expanded to improve their productivity, and special buildings can be placed in them that are unlocked through research and offer various kinds of bonuses.
Given that the first Frostpunk could already just marginally be considered a city builder game due to its gameplay peculiarities, it's true that with the above change Frostpunk 2 might be even more of a departure from that genre. That's not to say, of course, that this change doesn't work within the context of the game, nor that it doesn't serve the gameplay.

The other big change compared to the first game is the decisive role that factions play. Within the story's context, the citizens of New London are divided into at least 4 different factions, each with their own set of beliefs as to how New London should be governed, and the path the city in general should take towards its survival and salvation. It's also worth noting that when in sandbox mode instead of story mode, the factions that appear are different (or completely randomized) from those in the plot.
Finding the balance between factions is crucial to our longevity as Steward. These, along with the conditions in our city itself, like the sufficiency of goods, squalor, crime, etc., affect the Tension and Trust counters (the Discontent and Hope counters from the first game essentially). It becomes clear that having these counters at their optimal values is a pretty good indication of how well we are doing as rulers.
Beyond that, which of the two main factions we choose to support in the context of the story, either by voting for laws and researching technologies that promote their values or by following their own ideas on how to save humanity, plays a crucial role in the plot's development and changes many of the objectives we'll have to complete in the last chapters. The story's finale essentially branches between whether to pursue balance between the factions, whether to clearly lean in favor of one or the other, or whether to... execute Order 66 and impose order by force as the new Captain.

The main dangers in a sequel are always two: whether it will be SUPER similar to the game that precedes it without offering anything new, or it will be drastically different to the point where the elements that characterized the first game are not even present in it. In that light, I'd say Frostpunk 2 is probably the ideal sequel.
The gloomy, freezing atmosphere is here. The struggle for survival around the Generator too. So are the choices over the morals and beliefs of the world (all with distinct good or bad consequences), the exploration of the frozen world, the management of resources. The City Builder aspect is, as already said, slightly to very different in some aspects at least, but true to the spirit of the first game nonetheless and perhaps even an improvement upon it.
What's also here is the desperate tone that our attempt for survival takes several times, quite often leading to failed playthroughs. Especially from the 2nd (out of 4 total) difficulty level upwards, the margin for error narrows so much that you have to be prepared for failure even in the story's theoretically manageable prologue, something the game's developers themselves state in various tooltips. But that's undoubtedly part of the game's magic, and seeing your city survive, one way or another, even by compromising your moral integrity, is always an achievement that evokes feelings of unspeakable satisfaction.

Given that I didn't encounter any noteworthy bugs during my time with the game, and given its further departure from the City Builder genre as mentioned above, the main flaws I could point out in Frostpunk 2 are probably related to the depth of its mechanics and how overwhelming it can get when you have to macromanage so many counters and functions and resources and pieces of information in order to survive. Despite the developers' best efforts to present the individual elements of gameplay in a simple way, perhaps some sort of more explanatory tutorial was needed.
But of course it's also true that this relentless character is part of the experience, and any attempt to "water down" the information through over-explanation would certainly take away from it. And, as I said above, the Frostpunk 2 experience is as strong and perhaps even stronger than what we experienced in the first game. And that is, ultimately, the main thing we look for in a sequel.
RATING - 90%
90%
The City Did Not Fall
Cold, bleak and unforgiving, just like its predecessor. It may stray even further from the "traditional" City Builders genre, but when experiencing what it has to offer, Frostpunk 2 is in many ways the ideal sequel.