Recent reviews by Maple Syrup Potato

For people who have not played Frostpunk 1: You are in for a treat, one of the best strategy city builders in a while. Since Cities Skylines 2 sort of flopped, this was a nice breath of fresh air.
This game is nothing like Frostpunk 1. If you want more of that, go play Frostpunk 1. In fact: with "adjacency bonusses" of placable Disctricts, it feels a lot more like Civilization 6. But that is actually a good thing. Everyone who loves optimizing and min-maxing their cities, and everyone who loves to build sustainable infrastructures will absolutely love this game, and I strongly suggest you give it a try, if those kinds of games are your forte, or at least watch some Streamer of Youtuber and then decide.



While it is a clear step away from Frostpunk's original formula, the general idea remains: Bring a society of different people through the harsh weather by supplying the generator with fuel and providing enough food and housing for everyone. However: While the first game was all about micro managing, Frostpunk 2 (, which plays several years after Frostpunk 1) cares much more about macro-management. Instead of wood and iron, there is now only "Materials", which you harvest in extraction districts. There are no single houses anymore, instead you provide shelter for thousands of people by building residential districts. All of these benefit from being in crevices to protect from the wind, of by being next to each other, to share warmth. Heat zones don't exist, instead the generator uses more fuel the colder it gets and so on and so on...
This macro view also makes each game way longer and deeper. It takes a while to truly get everything up and running, and by the time it is, your city has outgrown you, so back you go. The scope is no longer days and hours, but weeks, as you build the city over years.
All in all, these mechanics that made the original what it was, drastically changed or were removed all together. But that is not a bad thing. Since FP2 has a much larger scope, it actually feels really refreshing to truly maximize efficiency. And I didn't even go into the numerous massive research trees, providing tons of uprades and buildings for each districts.
All in all the gameplay was surprisingly difficult, and for the first 2 hours I struggled with it, but it felt extremely great once I got the hang of it, and I suggest you give it a shot too.
The last thing (and in my opinion the best new feature), that absolutely blew me away is the political system. Without spoiling too much, you have to manage different factions and their influece on the city, sometimes pushing laws or research that they want, in order for them to vote in your favor on a topic. And especially in the higher difficulties, you could start to open an entire campaign office with strategies on which faction to support in which scenarios, so that they vote for your laws and barely give you the amount of votes needed to pass a law. I am an absolute sucker for these kinds of political mind games.
One thing that it has in common with its predecessor is the decisions you have to make throughout the game. But instead of their choices being immediately apparent, they often have long lasting consequences, can change your relation to other factions and so on. Every single law I forced convinced my totally democratically elected parliament to sign, had a quest associated with it. And if you want to sign a law on, for example social services, you will have to decide between one of several, each mutually exclusive laws, and each supported by a different faction.
All in all: This game has nothing to do with Frostpunk 1, but that is great!

My GTX 1070Ti managed the game very well on very high settings, it feels well optimized and the graphics are stunningly beautiful. If you saw the promotional material, you know what I mean, if you didn't, prepare yourself for a feast. The detail, although often overlooked, is extremely well made, and it is clear that love was put into every design. The steampunk aesthetic works wonderful with the more futuristic look that this game has, compared to FP1.
8 Points for beautiful graphics
+1 for feeling like it is well optimized

I don't run the newest high performance PC, i have a 1070 TI and 16GB RAM with a very good processor, but this game still brings my PC to its limits. While it runs very well in the early game, when the city is small, it quickly gets out of hand once the city grows and you expand. I encountered sound and video bugs due to low performance, and believe a lot of optimizing work will still have to be done.


The UI feels incoherent at times. Most buttons are too small for my old eyes, even after being changed in late developement. This results in some buttons weirdly feeling out of place compared to others, leading to some hilarious situations, when you have to use a magnifying glass to confirm the destruction of a district right before having half your screen blocked by a pop-up of some random guy telling you how he hates sewing because you passed a law that made people take the jobs of their parents (what do I care, man, just do your job). I also encountered some problems with buttons, that refused to be clicked, unless it was in a very specific location, which i believe comes from that late in development UI overhaul, and still has to be fixed.
But aside from that, the design is great, and the UI is really beautiful and very intuitive. Sure, it takes time to get used to, like everything does, but in general, I think it is one of the more managable UIs in modern strategy games.
9 points for the beautidful and intuitive UI
-2 for stupidly small buttons (sorry, grandpa problems)

Not really sure what to say here. The quality of the music remained the same. And that is the highest of praises I can give, since FP1's atmosphere was so thoroughly influeced by the amazing score.

Frostpunk 2 is among the games that I see myself sinking hundreds of hours into. I want to see every facet of it and optimize the ♥♥♥♥ out of my city in the new Utopia builder mode (basically the old endless mode from FP1). And my personal favorite, the political System, is also sooo much fun and provides a ton of replayability.
If you love optimization, and if you love being the sneaky, backstabbing, favor-trading, corrupt politician that I know you would be if you were actually in power, and if you really want to play a new spin on strategy and city building genre, this is exactly what you need.
If you just want more Frostpunk 1, then go and play that. The game is not any worse, just because there is a sequel now. No really, I will definitely still play some of that, since that game is a gem in and of itself, but for real, give this one a try. Especially since 40€ (or dollars if you are a freedom-person) is very, very generous for todays gaming standards. Especially for a game that you can sink hundreds of hours into. Just as a comparison: you could get 5 packs of cigarettes, 2-3 takeout meals, half a tank of gasoline, about 300 chupa chups lolli pops, half a car tire or about 0.01 caskets for the same amount of money. And what would you rather have?

for enthralling gameplay, graphics and music, but unfortunately still needs a little polish, so that I don't have to call my grandchildren to click the button to destroy districts for me, and the optimization needs some work too. If you are really unsure about it, wait for a sale or until optimization is better (if you have a good PC you won't care), but even right now it is in a very, very good state.

I started playing Cyberpunk 2077 after patch 2.1 (apparently the final major update) and I can say that in over 35 hours of playtime i have not encountered a single bug or glitch, as opposed to the people who encountered dozens after the initial release.
The game is incredibly polished, the graphics are amazing, the immersion is great and I see no reason as to not play this gem.
I have yet to get into Phantom Liberty, but so far I can say that CDPR did an amazing Job with the game, even if it took 2 years of patches to get to a finished state, which will unfortionately always leave a stain on its reputation.

For everyone not enjoying singleplayer metroidvanias: you might like this game, but it's nothing amazing.

However: I personally have never really played any metroidvanias that much, but Hollow Knight really got me invested in them. The gameplay is stunning, the art (music, visuals) are absolutely perfect, the combat is challenging but fair and it is incredibly satisfying to overcome a challenge. And at this point I didn't even start to talk about the lore and the hours of hours of content.

The game does not have any bugs (i have played for well over a hundred hours by the time of this review and have only encountered a single minor one).

This game is amazing because it manages to soothe your nerves, as opposed to fast paced, hectic multiplayer games à la Counter Strike, Leage of Legends and so on.

If you enjoy playing a game by yourself and play to enjoy as opposed to win you will have a great time in Hallownest and I wholeheartedly recommend you give it a try

Short: The game with all DLCs is very expensive and too expensive for all that it gives, however the gameplay is very good, especially if you are a fan of the Civilization franchise in general. If you are thinking about buying this game, wait until steam sale of a special discount, because I think only then is it really worth it.
Long: When I started playing Civ6 I came directly from the predecessor Civ5 (which i was a huge fan of) and was kind of disappointed. The comic-like look did not really feel like the Civ I was used to, and although the gameplay and the other civilizations were very nice to try out, the UI was extremely complicated and all the stuff with districts, adjacency bonusses, etc was very hard to get used to and it felt very weird at first.
However, as I started playing the game more and more (and bought the DLCs) I found love to the depth and optimization possible in this new Civ. I love planning out cities, strategizing and having a challenge, which is exactly was Civ6 challenges you to do. But having to spend such a ****ton of money on a game is very hard to justify, even for a Civ-Fan like me. If I was to buy this game today, I would definitely advise you to wait for the best deal possible (e.g. during steam sale) to buy it with all DLCs, because only then becomes it really better than Civ5.

Bought it for about ten cents with one of those steam coupons. I didn't expect much, well it costs as much as a bubble gum. And it gave me about as much fun as a bubble gum.
You have a space ship, flying around and killing other space ships. Half of the features implemented don't work, and it feels rather bad to steer. It's the kind of game you do when learning a programming language, and as it was made with unity, it took the creator probably 10 minutes to create. It is definitely not worth the 99 cents, but for 10... Hey, it's ten minutes of fun.
And all those bad critics here, what did you expect from such a cheap title? :D

Geniales Spiel. Eigentlich müsste ich einen Daumen runter geben, weil ich seitem ich dieses Spiel gespielt habe nie wieder ein anderes auch nur annähernd so genossen habe wie dieses. Eine wirklich solide Leistung und Entwicklung die CD Project Red da seit dem ersten Witcher geschafft hat. Umso mehr freue ich mich auf Witcher 4.