The lowest temperature ever recorded on Earth was -89.2 Celcius (Antarctica, 1983)Frostpunk: Console Edition
GRITTING THE ROADS WON’T SAVE YOU HERE... MARTIN KITTS
PUBLISHER 11 BIT STUDIOS / DEVELOPER 11 BIT STUDIOS / RELEASE DATE OUT NOW / COST £24.99/$29.99
neighbourhood, Frostpunk’s choices
tend to be a matter of life or death. Do
you draft children for an emergency
shift to gather resources, or keep
them safely indoors and risk running
out of coal when the storm hits?Cold shoulder
You can drive the workforce so hard
that accidents become frequent,
which means an increasing number of
people who can no longer do anything
useful for the collective but still
require feeding. Among the various
paths you can choose to remedy
this, amputating limbs will save the
injured from immediate death but will
rule them out of work until you can
develop prosthetics, which comes
at the expense of various other vital
measures you could be taking for the
larger community. At the other end of
the compassion scale, you can just
leave them to die, solving the problem
in the short term while adding to a
reservoir of social unrest that will
ultimately get you overthrown.
It’s tough watching the population
meter dwindle overnight, knowingYou may well have
simmed a city or two,
but probably not like
this. Forget traffic
and taxation – this
is urban planning
meets climate disaster in a unique
survival mash-up from the people who
brought us This War Of Mine.
It’s set in a Victorian alternate
reality where civilisation has been
destroyed by the sudden arrival of
a new Ice Age. Leading a band of
survivors northwards from a frozen
London in search of fuel, you end up
forming a settlement around a coal-
fired generator. Heat being the most
important factor in the survival of
your colony, the city is built in a circle
around its sole power source, which
makes it look unlike anything else in
this genre, but the differences are
more than just cosmetic.
Although there’s an open-ended
mode where you can just build forever
and see how large a city you can
maintain, the real focus of the game is
in surviving its story-based scenarios.
You’ll send out scouts to search for
other survivors, while marshalling your
resources for preset events such as
a rebellion or a deadly storm. New
technologies can be researched, and
knowing what’s coming up is critical
when deciding which ones to invest
your time in.
As you might expect, given the
developer’s pedigree, there are some
sticky moral dilemmas to ponder in
Frostpunk. While your typical city-
builder game might have you worrying
about people moving out if you
don’t put enough bus stops in their
that when the working day begins
afresh you’re not going to have
enough people left to keep some of
your vital infrastructure going. Having
five people in a workplace designed
for ten means it only operates at half
capacity, and there really isn’t much
you can consider superfluous. If you
shut it down, people will die or revolt.
There are some issues when
trying to fit buildings into a strict
circular template, so you’re often
left with empty wedges of prime
heated land, just a sliver too narrow
to allow anything to be built there,
but the game is mostly solid. It’s
also a thousand times more nerve-
wracking than any other city-builder,
and it’s difficult to emerge from any
of the scenarios without having
made decisions where you wish you
could have gone the other way. The
easiest thing to do would be to turn
the generator off and lie down for
a nice long sleep in the tundra, but
somehow life endures. Qshort
cutWHAT IS IT?
City-building meets
hard-nosed survival
in a frozen wasteland.
WHAT’S IT LIKE?
Narrative-based post-
apocalyptic SimCity,
with amputations.
WHO’S IT FOR?
If Cities: Skylines is
too serene for you, try
this for size.“There are some
sticky moral
dilemmas to
ponder”
OXM VERDICT
A unique survival
strategy story that
really knows how
to rack up the
tension.7
LEFT The game is
set in an
alternate 1886
where the world
is plunged into
a volcanic
winter.More Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 081REVIEW