Bought Frostpunk during the Steam summer sale and I LOVE it.
Takes place in an industrial revolution/steampunk setting when a sudden ice age happens. You people flee and start a new colony/city in the frozen waste, with this big ass coal generator in the middle of the city. I played through the first scenario, which took about 5 hours to beat. There are two more scenarios with more coming in the future. Unfortunately there is no sandbox/free build mode at the moment but the devs say there will be one by the end of the year.
Plays like a standard city builder/sim where you have to manage resources, space, and citizens, but with a few hooks.
-You can only build radially around the generator, in rings. You are also in a pretty small space tucked away inside this glacier, so space is at a premium.
-Heating is very important. The generator provides some heat to nearby buildings (generator level and range, and therefore coal consumption, can be improved by research later), and you can build little steam nodes to heat nearby buildings. The further away from the generator, the colder the building. People will get sick/die if their homes are too cold, and your resource collection will be less efficient in the cold. Temperature varies day to day, rising and falling, and so you need to manage your heat accordingly.
-You have two gauges to monitor your citizens, despair and hope. You want hope to be high and despair to be low, when either starts to shift things will happen. Crime will increase, there will be unrest, and other things that I don't want to spoil.
-You get to pass laws, which are permanent decisions that provide passive effects and open new building options. For example, how do you dispose of the dead? You can build cemeteries, which your citizens will like, or you can store them in snow pits to prevent decay. Storing them in snow pits will allow you to harvest their organs for medical boosts and turn them in to fertilizer for greenhouse boosts later, but you need to keep them away from heat sources (or risk illness), and not giving them a proper burial will cause hope to fall and despair to rise. Will you allow child labor? There are lots of choices.
-Passing laws leads you to two main ideologies, order and faith. Each has unique buildings and laws that can be passed mid/late game. There are also random events that can be triggered by certain choices, or just happen. A mother is requesting extra food rations because her kid is sick, saying yes/no will lead to different outcomes that could avalanche into major things...or be resolved on the spot with no issue.
-Moderately sized tech tree that lets you upgrade the generator, resource buildings, housing, etc.
-You can train scouts to explore the area around your city. They may discover survivors, caches of resources, establish supply outposts, and other things that could help/harm you. There's also a small little storyline you can follow.
-GREAT sound track, video effects, and menu animations that really add to the atmosphere of the game.
Soooooo it's a tough call. Once you complete the scenarios there's not really that much else to do. It's a GREAT base game, a little lacking in content though. I would recommend it now for $25, just understand that for the time being it'll take you like 10-15 hours to complete the currently available content and you'll have to wait a little bit to get more. But personally, I think it's worth it because the core gameplay and presentation is amazing.
Actually, I haven't played the episodes either, I should get those too.
