If you've played Banished and Age of Mythology, this is a great combination of these two kind of games where you play as an overseeing entity building out a colony while fending off creatures of myth and legend. What is here so far is an amazingly fun experience, where you balance income of resources with maintenance of working buildings, favor to gods that grant you bonuses, supporting your population with amenities like food, comfort, health, etc. So your resources are not just for spending on buildings and units, but to also make sure your town is properly taken care of and maintained. There's a lot available as part of the demo and a lot more that's locked for full release. Definitely worth trying out and following if you're big on sandboxes and colony sims.

An amazingly fun game, combining the playground aspect of games like Powdertoy with a level of factory based automation. With various processing tasks to do, you'd find yourself with something to do well past 10 or so hours of gameplay, and this is just the demo! I am looking forward to this full release and all the awesome features the dev is looking do add.

Something worth mentioning about all the "Abandoware" reviews of this game. This game isn't abanonware, that would require no active development. The game has been passed on to the community and the community now maintains and updates this game. Would I recommend this game? Sure, but keep in mind that this game is no longer being supported by the original devs. It does interesting things and has interesting mechanics like functional siege and mechanical power, a structure system that will cause buildings to collapse of proper support isn't provided. The videos showing builds falling apart to siege is legit. If the game goes on sale, definitely get it if it interests you.

Need to point out the toxic nature of the reviews here. The people who are negatively reviewing the game for missing features and buggy nature, complaining that it is an early access game miss the point of it being early access. The game and devs clearly tell you that the game is missing features, mechanics, will have bugs and what not. To negatively review the game just for it being an early access game is not a fair review on the game itself. Yes, it needs time to develop, yes it has bugs that can cause crashes. The point of the early access with IA is to work with the community on making the game better and something that the community will like. The way they do that is with giving people access to it early, playing around, and giving feedback. The negative reviews does hinder that as people will be turned away. Just give it time, let it cook, if you want to help with the development then play and give feedback. Otherwise, just let the devs cook and work in the features with the community.

Time to add another 3000 hours to this game!

So far, with what little the beta has available, this is a really solid city builder and resource management game. Gameplay is pretty different to the first with how construction and how policies are enacted. Rather than utilizing a direct resource to building model it uses something similar to Cities Skylines districts where you lay out district areas that have an initial currency cost. Yes currency. I've not gotten to iron yet but wood is used for maintaining districts and for making goods which is needed to keep your people happy and crime low. I've not played enough to give a full solid review, but so far this is starkly different with how the game was before. I'm not sure if it's all good, but so far I've enjoyed it.

The other aspect, the laws and social aspect has also been overhauled where instead of going strictly religious or industrial, you now have multiple sub-factions in your settlement who all have their own views on what they want and what they are against. This is where the council aspect comes into play, where you have laws that are voted on by these factions and depending on how prominent they are in the settlement will determine how many seats they will have at the council. The council is made up of 100 seats which are divided between each faction, and you can directly influence how prominent each faction is and isn't with favors, promising the faction they can say what the next law to be voted in is, promoting the faction, or just straight up paying them project funding. Each faction has their own benefits and drawbacks, and they each have their own demands and acts they stand against. It's not easy to keep everyone happy, but it seems like it's possible. I'm not sure yet what happens if you completely neglect or try to push a faction out.

Overall, it's a major difference in the prior game in how it's played, I am interested in how the faction system works and the fact that laws are now based on chance that you can influence based on your actions. Having things directly cost one resource I'm a bit iffy on, the introduction of currency vs the prior method of having each building have a material cost of iron and wood, as well as having limited upgrade slots for districts dependent on how much you expand them is a little bit of a drawback for me.

Space is now a premium and you can carve out space around you. The area around your generator is buildable on a hex grid, but if you want to expand you'll have do dig through frost hardened snow and free up the land for use. This is a change I'm not against, but I'm still on the fence about since I need to plan my builds a bit more. But it's an interesting change none the less that I'm going to be playing with more.

As for exploration and what not, it's a bit harder to best gauge how well this is done since you have a time limit to play. You got a limited number of weeks in game to build, explore, and make your choices, which exploration does cut a large chunk of time out of. Exploration seems mostly unchanged with the exception of instead of having one place to make your expeditionary forces, you now have logistic districts over old exploration hubs which grants you expedition resources. Gone are dedicated expedition teams, as now each expedition is based on difficulty of the location and how many expedition resources are required to send a team there. One change that I find interesting is when you find and make resource outposts you can now draw paths from these outposts to one of your logistics outposts which I assume makes travel to and from more efficient. Also yes, the expedition map is not just a bunch of dots on a map to send people to, you can see the layout of your settlement from the world map and its connections to the world map.

The other part that I am impressed with is the higher quality graphics and the fact god cam is now no longer as limited as it was in the first game. You can freely move around your settlement, rotate the camera around a point, zoom in and out, and rotate the view up and down. You can go full top-down view or bring the camera down to the ground and get some scenery views since the settlement and world map are both cohesive. This game is gorgeous and you can get some amazing views now that you're more free to move around.

Music I didn't get to experience much of since it's just the one gamemode, but what I hear so far is very reminiscent of the first game music. That is to say that I did enjoy what I heard. Most of what I heard was background music, meaning it wasn't noticed very often but that's good. I did notice that nothing felt missing when it came to the atmosphere this game made, as I felt more dedicated to ensuring the well being of my people and hearing out what each faction has to say. It felt very in place.

Overall, I can say with certainty that this is a good addition to the Frostpunk name, it's a bit of a radical turn in how you build and make changes, but it's not a bad thing in my opinion. I'm looking forward to the full release and I can say that I do recommend any FP1 fans give this game a try.

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With all that said, I'll be playing the release version of the game soon and add to this review as needed.

Helldivers 2 is an amazing game. If you are a fan of Starship Troopers, this is Starship Troopers the game. This game is amazing and fun and I highly recommend it.
This wouldn't be as big of a deal if Sony has a bad track record of keeping sensitive account details safe. I am not about to agree to let someone as bad as Sony require additional data for them to lose down the line. No, absolutely not. Refund requested on the bases of game access restricted due to non-required changing company policies.