Frostpunk 2: Breach of Trust Review — The Cold Shoulder

Ah, Frostpunk. When I was given the opportunity to review Frostpunk 2 prior to its release, I praised the game for its ability to heighten the sense of scale and responsibility without losing that classic Frostpunk feeling of nigh-hopeless turmoil. The newest DLC, Frostpunk 2: Breach of Trust, only expands that scope further, not only giving you some new buildings and mechanics to play with, but also introducing you to a brand new and fantastic Frostpunk story by way of a brand new campaign, in which players take on the role of ruling New Edinburgh.

In true Frostpunk fashion, the situation in New Edinburgh is dire. As you enter the city’s leadership position as First Citizen, you are faced with several tension-building issues threatening to bubble over: your former colony, Aurora, has declared independence, and without their shipments of food, your people are starving. Your city produces a rare excess of heat from its geothermal vents, but this heat production is causing tremors in the dormant volcano beneath the city, putting many lives at risk. Two factions argue for the best way to deal with your rebelling colony, as your city lacks sufficient workforce and resource production to survive on its own, and now everyone is looking at you to fix everything.

The new campaign in Frostpunk 2: Breach of Trust, like any good sequel, plays on your expectations of what came before. See, in New Edinburgh, heat is not an issue: the city thrives through the coldest seasons thanks to geothermal vents built over a dormant volcano. What you’re missing out on is everything else: food, prefabs, workforce, and basic industrial goods needed to keep your city alive and running. The rebelling colony, Aurora, has plenty of just about everything you need, and the story revolves around how you choose to take things back.

Frostpunk 2: Breach of Trust introduces a few new mechanics, but the most interesting of them all are the diplomacy and war mechanics around which the first chapter is built. With Aurora having all the food, it’s up to you to decide if you want to trade with the colony, bolstering its independence and sacrificing even more of your own precious resources, or if you want to march in and take the colony back by force.

Assuming you choose the latter, the game has you build barracks and recruit platoons of men who fight on the front line and, hopefully, eventually capture the colony. The warfare is depicted as brutal and costly, and it is difficult to balance on top of your steadily declining food reserves. Chances are, you’ll find yourself playing a mixed game of trade and warfare with Aurora, which is a rather realistic depiction of war. I don’t think you see a lot of that in video games.

That being said, the warfare mechanics are relatively simple. They are a bit too simple, if you ask me, as they just amount to what are essentially expeditions from the base game, but with a tug-of-war screen giving some flavor to a random number generator that decides if you win or not. Frostpunk 2: Breach of Trust didn’t need a complex combat system to be appealing, but I think expanding more on this area would have been a welcome addition to the game. Instead, it serves as a thematic addition that slightly shifts your playstyle, though not in a deeply meaningful way.

Honestly, that is sort of the vibe of the entire DLC. The new mechanics and buildings are interesting, but they are really only designed to deliver the unique narrative the game wanted to deliver in its DLC campaign. Outside of said campaign, it’s hard to say the DLC adds much that will change how you play or add a significant amount of time to your future sandbox matches.

The campaign has a fantastic story, and for $12, a new campaign with some new mechanical flavoring isn’t a bad offer at all. However, it’s not hard to feel that the DLC is a little underbaked, providing a lot of fun in a vacuum but mostly full of surface-level systems that add little to the game as a whole.

It’s hard to give a DLC a numerical rating. Chances are, you’re only interested in this DLC if you already enjoyed Frostpunk 2, and if you did, then I would definitely recommend buying it. The campaign is great, and it’s hard to argue with putting even more to do on top of your Frostpunk 2 experience. However, I don’t think it’s unfair to say that many players will see some of the systems added through this DLC and feel disappointed that they aren’t larger, more expanded upon, or play a more drastic role in the overall game.

Fans of Frostpunk 2 will enjoy Frostpunk 2: Breach of Trust. It’s a great campaign, one that puts a twist on how you play the game and one that adds some unique new mechanics with it. However, it’s hard to escape the feeling that those new mechanics could have been expanded upon more, and some of them really amount to gimmicks that only exist within that campaign. Regardless, it’s hard to argue with more Frostpunk, especially at the low price of the DLC, and after sinking hours upon hours into the content, I can definitely say I enjoyed it.

Try Hard Guides was provided with a Steam code for this PC review of Frostpunk 2: Breach of Trust. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Frostpunk 2: Breach of Trust is available on Steam, Xbox, PlayStation, Epic Games, and GoG.