The Sinking City 2 Was Finished Under Bombardment

The Sinking City 2 went live this morning at 9 AM on Steam, PS5 and Xbox Series. Behind that launch sits a Kyiv studio that spent four years finishing its game between air raid alerts and power cuts. Frogwares is selling its survival horror at 49.99 €, ten euros under the going rate for a big release, and critics have landed it at 81 on OpenCritic.

Along the way, Frogwares also switched genre. The slow detective work of the first game gave way to combat and resource management. That pivot accounts for part of the delay, and it also explains why reviews describe a tighter game than its predecessor.

The setting is still the 1920s, in an Arkham swallowed by water. The tags players attach to the game on Steam sum up the programme well enough: Lovecraftian, action, third-person shooter and horror.

Kyiv, ninety people, and a war

Frogwares employs more than 90 people in Kyiv. The Russian invasion began in February 2022, and the studio kept working. Not under good conditions.

Drone attacks are part of daily life, and so are missile strikes. When energy infrastructure was targeted, power went missing for months and production stopped. The team scattered whenever safety demanded it. Crowdfunding kept the lights on.

One detail says everything about the context. The week Frogwares locked in its release date, several Ukrainian cities were taking the worst bombardment since the invasion started. The studio’s head of publishing summed it up by saying everything could still change in an instant.

None of that context was turned into a commercial excuse. The launch price sits below that of a major production, and the press judged the game on its merits like any other.

Detective work gives way to combat

Here is the other major shift. The 2019 game leaned on an open world and detective mechanics widely seen as slow. Plenty of players praised the atmosphere and complained about the pacing.

The Sinking City 2 cuts through that. The open world gives way to tighter spaces, combat moves to the front, and you have to ration ammunition and healing alike. The reference most reviews reach for is Resident Evil, which places the turn well enough.

Frogwares gave fair warning back in October 2025, when it pushed the game into 2026. Two reasons were given. The war, and the fact that designing a survival horror calls for an entirely different approach than an adventure game, which inevitably slows development down.

Sinking City 2 lands 81 on OpenCritic

The numbers came out the day before launch. The Sinking City 2 scores 81 out of 100 on OpenCritic after thirty-two reviews, with a Strong rating and 69% of critics recommending it. On Metacritic, the score swings between 79 and 84 depending on platform. That puts the game in the top 17% on the site.

So critics back the change of course, with one reservation that keeps coming up. Bugs. Nothing that stops you playing according to the reports, but enough to cost a few points on a game that could have aimed higher. On the player side, Steam showed Very Positive reviews within hours of opening.

A crowded August for third-person action

The calendar gives Frogwares no favours. The game lands a week after the State of Play devoted to Phantom Blade Zero and a few days before gamescom 2026, which will pull all the attention from August 25. Elden Ring arrives on Switch 2 on the 28th.

This turn toward combat and resource management is hardly an isolated case. Genres have been borrowing mechanics from each other for years, to the point that shooters ended up raiding RPGs and survival games. A detective studio pivoting to survival horror follows the same logic.

That leaves the question of the gamble. Frogwares traded its identity as a detective studio for ground already held by established series. At an 81 average and a price below the competition, the maths appears to hold.