I picked this up at the beginning of last week, and after a couple of test runs that I reset after a few days, I lost one game around day 15-20 due to my hope draining to zero after a certain event, and then beat that scenario the second time.
I thought I was doing well, but it got very tense towards the end and it really felt like I only just scraped by, as so many things were going wrong. I was down to 8 hours of coal left, with the generator about to go critical.
Until the storm I think I only lost two people - then lost another 44 to it, ending with 625 survivors.
I really enjoyed playing through that first scenario, and after checking out the achievements (since I had unlocked a half-dozen by the end of that game) it looks like some of those would be really challenging if you wanted to replay it.
I was somewhat concerned after hearing that there are only three linear/scripted scenarios, but I found myself thinking about playing through the first one again to see if I can improve things, or to see how it plays out differently.
I do wish there was a proper stats screen displayed at the end though.
I've now made an attempt at the second scenario without any test-runs which seemed like it was going well and wasn't nearly as challenging, only to hit a hard game over because I did not have quite enough resources at a certain point.
Maybe they have already calculated that it's not possible to beat the scenario if you don't have a set amount of resources by that point, but it didn't seem like it was unwinnable with the number of automatons I had going.
The failure conditions that I've hit in the game so far have been quite dissatisfying, as they both felt very abrupt rather than gradually running out of resources and losing to the cold.
The game performance really dragged towards the end (<30 FPS with a Ryzen 1700X / GTX 1070, no matter what graphical options I used - and I was starting to feel nauseous from it) and I do have quite a few issues with the interface.
Towards the late game, it felt like there was far too much micro-management, and then after a certain point there was nothing to do but leave it running on maximum speed.
This is not unique to Frostpunk though - I find it to be a common issue in games like Civilization too. Maybe I'm just approaching these wrong or not playing on a high enough difficulty, but late-game Civ often has me building every possible structure/late-game units available for all of my cities and hitting next-turn a bunch while I wait for a victory condition to be reached, rather than making tactical decisions. Early-game is far more engaging - and it's the same problem here.
By the end of the game, the UI is completely cluttered - and a lot of it is not particularly useful information.
Though I started out with a structured layout, events happened towards the end of the game that resulted in my city being almost random as I scrambled to build.
It would be really useful if holding the Alt key or some other modifier color-coded all of the buildings, or if you could bring up an overlay that let you highlight only certain types of building - such as steam hubs.
Though I liked the idea of having certain buildings which could only be operated by workers or engineers, having to manage that when you have an abundance of either working in buildings that can use both is frustrating.
Finding a building with workers, replacing them with engineers, and then putting the workers in the new worker-only building (or vice-versa) becomes a chore.
Auto-pause options would be nice too. There have been a few times that I've just missed that a scout has arrived at a location or have accidentally left workers idle - and losing half a day of work to that can be a huge deal.
As I said though, I really enjoyed it overall - especially with such a narrow victory in the first scenario.
Though I did make an attempt at the second scenario, I'm thinking that I will likely either take a break from it, or replay the first one again using a different approach to see if I can do better.
Despite being a slow-paced game that you can pause at any moment, it really gets quite tense and stressful at times, and I may just be done with it for now.
But even if I only beat the first scenario, I'm satisfied with that for the money. I still put more time into it over the last week than many other games. I'd estimate 12-15 hours, as a lot of Steam's recorded time was idle.