Frozen City Review
The ice age has come, and survivors gather to fight to survive. In this latest strategy game from Century Games, you will be helping survivors build their city and fight to survive in this frozen land. But while building your city, you will be faced with many decisions and hardships to keep your people alive.
Building From the Ground Up
When you first arrive in the frozen landscape, you’ll immediately build a kitchen, hunting cabin, and sawmill. These are the basic necessities needed to start a civilization from the ground up. The wood allows you to fuel your furnace and upgrade buildings, while the kitchen and hunting cabin feed the survivors harvesting the resources. This first camp shows you what Frozen City has in store. After you get through the first camp, which only takes a few short minutes, you’ll go to the next city.
In the second city, wood is an infinite resource, and you are introduced to coal, which becomes a staple in all the cities. Now you will focus on scrap iron and coal to build the city more. From here, you will build the rest of the cities from the ground up. I found this both frustrating and rewarding. I love building from the ground up but hate that all the hard work that went into my previous city was usually for naught. This is because nothing gets transferred to the new city unless it becomes an infinite resource.
There are also events for you to participate in that feel like speed-running a different setting of the game. I personally loved these events because it would be two days of building as large of a city as possible to get extra rewards. Some themes would be grandpa’s farm, fish farming and the last autumn. The events normally last two days and let you develop your city for as many rewards as possible.
Decisions, Decisions, Decisions
Even with those infinite resources helping you start your new city, there are still plenty of decisions to make. You’ll be able to build the first few basic buildings with the infinite resource from the previous camp. However, you will not be able to upgrade them much until you have started harvesting new resources. This leads to you having to decide where to allocate the resources best. Luckily, the two-hour offline time will help you continue gathering resources, and the task section at the bottom of the screen gives you ideas to work with.
Two of the biggest mistakes I made were getting overzealous about adding several buildings at once and upgrading one station instead of upgrading several. Adding one or two buildings at a time is better when first starting, so you aren’t spreading resources too thin. If you run out of resources too quickly, you risk letting the fire go out, and your survivors get sick. But if you upgrade one building, your other buildings will fall behind and run low on resources. You have to be careful about keeping your resources high, or you risk your survivors dying.
Hero Hardships
In the second city, you are introduced to the heroes. After unlocking the hospital and leveling up the coal mine, you will unlock some heroes who help increase production. You can upgrade these heroes as you accrue wishing and blasting stars, and the more you upgrade them, the more they boost production. However, they are more hassle than help.
The heroes were my most significant issue throughout the game. If you did not receive them from building the structure, you could be waiting for a long time. This caused me to slow down or stop certain factories from working, leading to shortages in specific resources. It also caused me to lose several survivors, usually due to starvation.
To upgrade the heroes, you need both types of stars and hero cards. The more you upgrade them, the more expensive it becomes. If you do not have the hero, or if the hero is not leveled up enough, you are stuck having too few survivors at a station. Many times, I had multiple open spots for a survivor to work but could not fill them because my hero was not leveled up enough. This just leads to slower production and longer waiting times to upgrade stations.
Overall, Frozen City is fun and keeps players on their toes with decision-making and anticipating what to build or upgrade next. It definitely needs some fine-tuning, especially regarding the heroes and their roles. However, since the game is still fairly new, there is a lot of room for the developers to improve it. With that said, if you love strategy games and want to survive an ice age, this is a wonderful play for you.
