Ready for another survival/strategy game…which should I play? I own Surviving Mars but Frostpunk is on sale on GOG.
I own both and prefer Frostpunk for the setting and the choices you have to make. Surviving Mars isn’t bad, exactly, but it feels pretty generic.
I haven’t played Surviving Mars, but I have played Frostpunk for a couple of hours. I like free-form sandboxy strategy games like Rimworld and Prison Architect; I personally just didn’t bond with Frostpunk. It’s beautifully done with a lot of love and care, but to me it’s more of a “puzzle” game.
I ended up starting FP last night, maybe 2/3 hours in. That’s including several false starts while I figured out what the heck I was doing. I decided to stop for the night on day 4 with no discontentment and not having lost anybody.
I like it so far, but it’s one of those games that I’m afraid I’ll get in over my head pretty soon. But then again from what I understand most playthroughs end in failure so…
It’s a very fun game to watch/listen to, it reminds me of Cities: Skylines in that regard. About my only real gripe so far is that the toolbars are too small, and I keep wanting to zoom in farther than I’m able. Again like you can in Cities. I tried messing with resolution settings but it didn’t make much of a difference. I suppose I might learn the hot keys…
The thing about Frostpunk that’s not immediately obvious, is that it is rather time-based. You MUST have achieved certain things by certain dates, or you’ll lose. And those goals can be quite non-intuitive, with little-to-no advanced notice.
Surviving Mars is much closer to the standard city-builder style, where there’s no real time limitations that don’t evolve from gameplay. So, a very sit-back-and-let-it-run game.
So a game of Frostpunk will generally be much shorter, and more scripted. But the choices you make will be more immediate, and more impactful.
Wow, sat down yesterday to continue the game I started the night before. That was about 6:00. I realized I was researching entirely the wrong things and stuff was about to go bad, so I started a new game. I decided that no matter what, I’d play that one to the end.
6 hours (and ~18 game days) later, I was banished from my city. Man, this game is bleak. Still, I started feeling some affection for my little people. Seeing them trundle off through the snow with torches to go hunt and whatnot.
Raza is right, it is kind of a puzzle game. I feel like you’d have to play a couple dozen times to finally know how everything should be progressing and actually even come close to making it to the end.
After I quit (or should I say, failed and inevitably froze to death in the wastes) I realized that in that respect, it reminds me of Age of Empires. When I first played that, I remember aborted game after aborted game while I figured out what I needed to be doing.
It’s been a long time since I got so sucked in to a game, Subnautica would be the last.
I’ll probably play again this weekend, but I’m not sure at this point if I’ll try to eventually ‘win’. I’m just not sure I have enough time to invest.
Made it to the last day and the end of the game.
Man, that was pretty stressful! I will probably play it again, but it’s going to be a while.
Excellent game, I would absolutely recommend it.
Man, that was pretty stressful!
To repeat my earlier comments, the game is really well-done, in pretty much every way, and is very popular. But ultimately I found it stressful, not relaxing, mostly because as Unpronouncable says it has a pretty strict time-based challenge to it, and it just isn’t right for me. Granted, a game like RimWorld also has some sort of you shouldn’t wait too long before doing this…, but the time box is much looser.