Review: Frostpunk: On The Edge – A Mediocre Ending to a Brilliant Game

Review Frostpunk: On the Edge

Frostpunk is one of my favorite strategy titles of recent times and 11-bit studios recently released the final expansion for the title On the Edge. While the previous expansion The Last Autumn was a prequel to the game, On The Edge is a direct sequel to the base game with New London now becoming a self-sustaining society. The final expansion brings some brand new changes and mechanics to the game similar to the previous expansion. This is our review of Frostpunk: On the Edge in which we try to survive in a brand new outpost and form some new connections in the Frostland.

The story of Frostpunk: On The Edge sees you taking charge of a brand new outpost that has been set up near a newly found Military Warehouse that has plenty of supplies for New London. Your goal is to take control of this outpost, make sure that the local community survives, and create a steady supply chain of supplies for New London. However, things are not as simple as they appear on the paper. Since you are working under the rule of New London, it means that you do not have complete freedom on how you can run your outpost. You have to report major events back to New London and only they can sign new rules for your outpost accordingly.

Review Frostpunk: On the Edge

This means that you do not have access to your Book of Laws right from the start of the game unlike the previous expansions for the game. All rules are signed by New London and you have no option but to abide by them. This seriously hinders your freedom in the game that the base game and the previous expansions allowed while managing your society. After the establishment of a safe route between your outpost and New London, you must collect and send a steady amount of resources back to New London who will then send food and supplies to you since you cannot collect food and certain resources at your current location.

This however becomes really tedious when New London starts imposing extremely harsh rules on you which forces the people to riot and you have to choose between whether you want to keep following New London or ditch them and find your own alternate sources for food and other important resources. Naturally, you would want to become free and the game only begins properly at this point. After you have been cut off from New London and no new resources are coming your way, you begin to explore Frostland around you in a bid to find more resources. While exploring, you find many new settlements that are willing to help you out but only for a price.

Resource collection has always been a challenge in Frostpunk however this time around, after a few starting resources, the location runs dry and you have to rely on another brand new mechanic called Trading. With trading, you can develop new relationships with your newly found friends in the Frostland and offer them goods in exchange for goods. You then create a brand new unit type called Construction Team who travel to the new settlement and create Safe Routes and a Trading Hubs from where you can get in touch with the new settlements, offer them help, and in return ask for help as well.

Now, this is where the scenario starts to lose its charm a bit. The trading mechanic is not very deep and sometimes feels extremely shallow and broken. You will need to help the settlements with their development plans but you cannot simply trade with your surplus goods. Each plan requires a specific amount of resources which means that you can only trade with them if you have those particular goods and not your surplus goods. This puts a serious hold on your own resources especially food because there is no way to get food in your own location. For example, with the very first outpost, I had to send over steel, coal, and wood most of the time in exchange for food. In the beginning, you will not have a decent stockpile of resources which means that your people will go hungry for quite some time, and even if you have a full stockpile of surplus wood that you do not need, you cannot trade it for food without the 50 Steel requirement slapped right with it.

Review Frostpunk: On the Edge

This makes trading a bit of an unreliable mechanic despite the game calling it ‘steady source of resources’. You also have to ensure that the other settlements are happy with you. Loyalty and Favors come into play here. As you continue to help the settlements with their problems, they will allow you to ‘avail a favor’ about which I am still confused about because sometimes even after helping a settlement a lot, I was still unable to ask them for a favor. As a favor, you can ask for more workers, a specific resource, or any sort of other help that you might need in your society. For me, Favors is another mechanic that needed more work in the game to make it more effective in your gameplay.

There is no new Book of Laws this time around too. Another thing that was frustrating for me was that we were unable to change the laws signed by New London even after splitting up with them. Like I said earlier, New London dictates different laws on your outpost depending on your performance and if you ask them for help regarding certain things. You cannot change these rules then and even after you throw out their administrators. This means that you are stuck with the decisions made by New York and must progress in the game with them in place even after you get your access back to the Book of Laws. We should have been able to resign laws favoring our society when we get access to the Book of Laws instead of carrying forward dictated laws.

Review Frostpunk: On the Edge

Apart from this, the game pretty much plays out the normal way. You have to look after your own people too while managing relations with the other settlements. As a matter of fact, the whole point of forming relations with other settlements is to make sure that you can meet the requirements of your own people. There is no generator this time around so you have to keep your people warm with alternate options. The game starts at a very pleasant temperature but as you progress in the game, the weather becomes colder and colder and since there is no generator, you have to really get creative to ensure that you have plenty of coal to keep your people warm.

You can finish the scenario in around 4 hours but if you want to take your sweet time, you can drag it to a maximum of 6 hours if you use active pause a lot. 4 hours is a little low for a Frostpunk title especially when you compare it with the base game or its previous expansion. I will be honest here that I am not really a big fan of the whole trading system of the game. It felt empty and even with me sending out regular supplies, the in-flow was very disappointing and I was always short on a resource or two especially food because of the pre-set trade requirements rather than the option to opt for the free trade of our surplus resources.

Coming to the build quality of the expansion, I played Frostpunk: On the Edge on a system running AMD Ryzen 7 3700X with 32GB, 3600Mhz Ram, and an AMD RX 5700xt GPU. The game ran pretty well on my system and there were no crashes or glitches for me. I spent over 8 hours and ended the scenario twice just to see if I can trigger some sort of a different outcome for my outpost. The frames were steady and really high with no dipping or freezing of any sort. Some people online have been having problems with the game crashing on them repeatedly however I tried different things to see if the game would crash on me such as switching between the game and different apps while playing or even starting some heavy apps in the background. The game ran exceptionally well on my system which shows that the build is pretty stable.

Final Verdict:

While I have read many reviews which are too harsh on the final expansion, I still think that it is not as bad as those review claim it to be. It might not be as complex and challenging as The Last Autumn or the base game but on its own, it is still a challenging scenario despite being a short one. The game did not crash on me as well. The new trading mechanic surely feels shallow but it also enables you to play around with how you want to proceed for the future of your outpost. Every single decision you make has a lasting impact on your outpost so decision making is still a strong suit of the expansion. I understand why most of the community is frustrated over how the DLC was executed considering the fact that the base game and the previous expansions set an extremely high bar for the game. For me, it was a decent experience, and having spent quite a lot of time in the base game and the expansions, I can easily say that you should experience Frostpunk: On The Edge. If you are a Frostpunk fan, you should definitely give this expansion a try with an open mind. I am sure that it will not disappoint you as much as most of the game reviews depict.

Final Score: 6.0/10

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About the Author: Umair Khalid

Founder of GamesHedge, Umair enjoys a wide variety of video games ranging from RPGs to racing games. Currently busy with The Crew Motorfest and Kingdom Rush 5: Alliance.

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