Frostpunk 2’s Breach of Trust is sitting at Mixed on Steam two months after launch

Breach of Trust, the second paid expansion for Frostpunk 2, arrived on June 23 across PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Two months on, its Steam rating tells an awkward story: Mixed, with 46 percent of 448 user reviews positive, and recent reviews trending Mostly Negative at 39 percent.

Critics landed somewhere else entirely. The DLC holds roughly 75 on Metacritic, though from a small handful of reviews. The gap between press and players is the real news here, not the launch itself.

Fire instead of frost

The expansion drops the series’ defining threat. Instead of a blizzard, New Edinburgh sits beside a volcano destabilised by years of hard geothermal extraction to feed its Generator.

The Old Captain has been deposed. You take over as First Citizen, and the job comes with a leash: a periodic Vote of Trust that measures whether the city still backs you. When ash blankets the sky, the only viable refuge is Aurora, an independent colony on a frozen lake, which you can trade with, extort, or take by force.

Content-wise it is a real package. Five communities and factions, the Tremors and Volcano Night hazards, two scenario maps, five new buildings and hubs, and a batch of new laws. It costs $12.99 on Steam.

Where it loses people

The recurring complaint in reviews is containment. Most of the new mechanics, buildings and systems stay locked inside the DLC campaign and never reach Utopia Builder or skirmish play, which is exactly the opposite of what Fractured Utopias did last year.

The scenario is also tightly scripted. Reviewers flagged restricted tech paths and a narrative that leaves little room to improvise, plus a brutal opening state inherited from your predecessor that can wall off newer players before the volcano ever becomes the problem. Several noted the whole thing ends quickly.

The franchise keeps moving anyway

11 bit studios announced all of this back in April at Frostpunk Franchise Fest, alongside the news that the series had passed 11 million players.

A third Frostpunk 2 DLC, codenamed Surge, is still pencilled in for a 2026 window. The original Frostpunk is heading to Nintendo Switch, and Frostpunk 1886, the Unreal Engine 5 reimagining of the 2018 game, is due in 2027. There is a comic on the way too, made with Rocketship Entertainment, written by Justin Jordan with art by Ryan Benjamin.

Surge is where the studio gets to answer the Breach of Trust criticism. Whether the next expansion’s ideas escape their own scenario is the thing to watch.