Frostpunk Review (Tiderion)
For those who enjoy brutal survival games, this is a great purchase. Its setting is on point, it's bleak, it's miserable, it makes you want to grab a jacket.
The entire game (Minus expeditions) is set in a single location around which you will build your colony. Within each variation, as far as I can tell, there's no variation as to what the landscape and the available resources will contain. Don't take that to mean that there's no variety, there's plenty of it, it just comes in the form of the dynamic events that occur throughout the game as well as the expeditions you'll undertake.
There are five resources to find and utilize - coal, wood, steel, food and steam cores - and you have very little time to setup systems to obtain these resources at least as fast as you're consuming them. There's a somewhat invisible resource of heating, provided by your generator by way of expending coal, and this will be your life line in this post-apocalyptic land of frost.
As the game moves forward, you will be in a race against time to obtain what resources you need to keep your civilians alive in that moment while also keeping more than just a little of your brain power on what they're going to need next. And they will need more things and increasing amounts of them sooner than you'd think.
The resources present on the ground will run out in a matter of days, and you'll have to establish more permanent methods of harvesting the raw materials you need to stay afloat, as well as ways to heat everything during cold spells or you'll quickly become inundated with sick citizens who still need beds to sleep in and food to eat but won't be providing valuable manpower.
My main complaint about this game is that, within a scenario, there's basically no room for error. If you don't meet a specific deadline for certain things - providing housing within the first day for instance - then you will quickly be beyond recovery for that run, and you're left with limping along to an inevitable loss or just starting over. But the thing is, that next run you'll fix that issue and then immediately be hit with another situation that you couldn't have foreseen without foreknowledge, fail again, and repeat this process ad nauseum.
And yes, it's a survival game. I get that failing and learning and trying again is what the game is. But I feel like they should have made each critical point such that you have some time to adjust and correct course without outright failing. Sometimes you can, but the vast majority of the time, if it's your first time seeing some critical event, you're almost certainly about to spin up a new game.
All in all, for anyone who loves more challenging survival games, city planning, etc, this is a game for you.
Side note - the board game of this is also really good and super challenging.