Frostpunk 2 (PS5) Review: Survival Game Gets Excellent Console Port

2018’s Frostpunk was a breath of fresh air by combining city-building with survival aspects. It was a brilliant fit, made all the better by its unique alternate history world that takes place after a volcanic winter. It received a stellar console port a year later, and now, six years later, its sequel has come to PS5. Thankfully, Frostpunk 2 is another successful port that manages to make a complex strategy game a blast on consoles.

The biggest difference from the original game and Frostpunk 2 is its significant increase in scale. While immediate survival in its harsh post-apocalyptic world was in doubt in the first game, its sequel finds you dealing with much larger cities and focusing more on the task of management than before. There’s still just as much strategy as before, but it’s on a grander level, and you’ve got to think about things on the macro level — your decisions impacting entire districts and large sects of people rather than individual buildings. It’s a brilliant way to naturally build the game out, as a sequel should, without getting overly in the weeds with too many mechanics.

This change also lends itself to one of the game’s most interesting mechanics, which is the addition of political factions. These communities each have their own ideas as to how things should be run and won’t be scared to stage protests and even shut down districts if necessary. You’ll always be at odds with some factions, so you’ll have to come to compromises at times and negotiate with factions to get on your side in order to pass laws. It’s a rewarding function, and one that keeps you on your edge as you try to keep your city free of disease and crime.

As for the port, the PS5 version of Frostpunk 2 has an in-depth and easy-to-follow tutorial, which is a must for getting used to playing a city-building game with a controller. This might not be needed for those who played the original game’s console port, but it certainly helped me come to grips with the controls. There are still a lot of menu layers to navigate and buttons to remember, which means this will always be ideal to play on a PC with a keyboard and mouse, but it certainly gets the job done and is very playable.

One of the biggest issues I find with a lot of PC ports is that the user interface is far too small for television play. Thankfully, 11 Bit Studios has included two UI options, and while it defaults to “Big,” I’d recommend playing on “Huge” so everything is legible from a distance. There is also an optional setting to use PSSR upscaling for PS5 Pro owners. The game looks great with this enabled, and you can also revert to Unreal’s temporal super resolution if you wish.

Frostpunk 2 (PS5) Review: Final Verdict

While it’ll never be optimal playing a dense city-building game on a console, Frostpunk 2 is the latest example that it can be done well. The survival game is still thrilling to play with a controller, even if it might take a while for the controls to become second nature. With proper UI scaling and PSSR support, 11 Bit Studios has done a great job with this port.