Frostpunk
BANGER · Strategy · 2018
Steam Deck PlayableThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $5.99.
- Length
- 10.7h
- Value
- $0.56/hr
- Reviews
- 93% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, GeForce GTX 660, Radeon R7 370 or equivalent with 2 GB of video RAM, 8 GB of storage. Windows only.
Frostpunk is the first society survival game. As the ruler of the last city on Earth, it is your duty to manage both its citizens and infrastructure. What decisions will you make to ensure your society's survival? What will you do when pushed to breaking point? Who will you become in the process?
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
It has never been cheaper than $2.99. That was June 2024. It has been discounted 89 times in the 8 years tracked here, typically at 70 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today's $5.99 at 80 percent off still sits 100 percent above the floor, so a deeper cut exists in its history.
Take the discount away and it is a 66. With it, 89.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 97 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 97 percent. It outscores the games it most resembles, including Frostpunk 2 ($22.49, scores 47) and IXION ($34.99, scores 51).
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $9.91. It costs $5.99.
The press gave it 84; the people who bought it give it 93 percent. A 9-point gap in the buyer's favour.
Steam's global achievement data says under 1 percent of players ever finish it. On a 10.7-hour game, that is a lot of paid-for hours most people never see. 8 of the 800 Steam-purchase reviews sampled here come from buyers who refunded the game, sampled from reviews written December 2025 to September 2026. That is fewer refunded reviewers than 7 in 10 paid games this site has sampled to the same depth, and among the 2,864 games in its genre sampled this deeply, 2,380 have a larger share. Inside the two-hour refund window, 64 percent of the 4,490 reviews written there were positive, against 93 percent overall, and those are 4 percent of everything written about it.
10.7 hours to finish it, 56 to exhaust it. The completionist tail is 5.2 times the campaign.
Still 1.7K concurrent players, 8 years in.
The drop-off
50% start to <1% finishMost players never reach the end. On a 10.7-hour game, that's a lot you pay for and may never use. Steam global achievements
Players
1,699 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
This isn't really a city builder - it's a series of impossible choices dressed up as one. Every law you pass, every resource you ration, every worker you push past their limit chips away at something, and the game never lets you forget it. There's no clean way to win. You just decide what you're willing to live with. The generator hum, the constant temperature readout, the way the whole map just fades into white the...
"its dicken! its a book you misunderstood! :(" d*ck mick shut your **** *** up engineer w power hunger simulator
Awesome game. Simple enough to get the hang of quickly but also complicated enough to keep coming back for more.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
Cite this score
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Frostpunk scores 89/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/323190/frostpunkThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 12, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.