The Forever Winter early access review: a messy extraction shooter that should have stayed in cover longer

The winter of our discontent

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios

Wartorn sci-fi extraction shooter The Forever Winter has had a messy launch into early access. For those who don’t know the game, this third-person helljaunt sees its players wandering through the battlefields of an endless conflict between three major world powers. Mechs stomp past you, ignoring you in favour of decimating enemy soldiers. Bug-like drones hover overhead, scanning for prey. And horrifying mommy harvesters scavenge bodies from the debris. As a collection of imagery, it’s powerful stuff. As a game that you can play (with up to three pals) it is very rough, and not just around the edges.

The Forever Winter – Official Gameplay Overview Trailer

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The Forever Winter’s like Escape From Tarkov, or the Dark Zone of the Division games. Just swap “PvPvE” for the letters “PvEvEvE”. You have a HQ called “the Innards”, where you prep for excursions into open maps of varying size. You scav around in the bodies of fallen enemies for loot: ammo, weapon attachments, floppy discs that can be sold for cash, cases of tools, cybernetic detritus. You don’t have a whole lot of room in your “rig” (a big steel backpack), so you need to prioritise, often fulfilling requests for goons from different factions.

A quest might ask you to bring back parts stripped from “Europan drones”, for example. One option is to take these violent drones on yourself, firing your meagre bullets into the air in an attempt to pierce their tinny bods. At this point you become an open target. Nearby enemies will investigate the gunfire too, and before you know it you’re surrounded by cyber-zombies and tactical SWAT bastards who all consider you hostile. Survival in these scenarios is often a case of running away and hoping you don’t get shredded by the helicopter that has suddenly shown up to join in the murder festivities.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios

Or! You could just skulk around for a moment. The factional groups perform (often unpredictable) patrols throughout the landscape, and frequently encounter one another. Your coveted drones will inevitably get into a scrape and (if you’re lucky) find themselves exploded. The remnants are yours, if you can grab them without being seen. Make it to an extraction point, and you bring all the loot home. Die, and you are sent back to HQ with your hands empty and all your gear stranded on the battlefield (you can recover it, though, Souls-style).

Conceptually, it is a nice twist on the Tarkov formula. And sometimes an expedition into the eternowar does evoke feelings of being the little guy in a grander conflict, hoping not to get quickly annihilated. Once or twice I felt the buzz of scraping my way out of the trenches, such as the time I made a desperate decision to start a gunfight with a horde of mecha-undead close to the extraction. I had only a few fistfuls of shotgun shells left to my name, but I had to risk it. I got out, barely.

Sadly, both the illusion of a grand war and the tension of a bigger threat is often shattered by the game’s buggy nature and treacley movement. The player character’s handling, for instance, feels appropriately weighty (you’re carrying a big metal back-box). But it’s irksomely slow to get moving and has a very “railroaded” sprint, with zero leeway for strafing movement. Something that would be useful for avoiding the many jagged rocks, rebars, and rubblebits that your character can get caught on. This is not a “tidy” space.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios

The enemy is likewise janky, often turning jerkily or skating across the ground like they’re wearing a pair of Heelys. Bad guy squads will spawn incredibly close to you, filling your fragile body with surprise lead long before you can get away or return fire. Big mechs freeze and do nothing, then splort to life without warning. Tanks are particularly hilarious, driving courageously into obstacles and doing donuts like a boy racer in a small town car park late at night. In one of my wanderings, a tank was being shot by three enemy troopers. Presumably furious, it farted out a huge cloud of smoke and catapulted into the sky, spinning wildly like a plastic toy flicked across the bedroom floor. War is hell. Or maybe just funny as hell.

There’s another quirk that has upset some players. You need to keep your HQ stocked with enough water for the citizens of your homehole to survive. This means finding water barrels out in the wastes and often prioritizing the extraction of those barrels above other more exciting loot, like lockboxes you can sell for cash, or “gacha” crates with unknown trinkets you can only crack open when you get home. If water runs out, your HQ effectively dies and you lose everything in your stash – all the items you’ve gathered so far evaporate.

This in itself doesn’t sound too bad, and it fits with the theme of survival in a harsh world. The kicker is: water depletes in real time, even when you’re not playing the game. Which no doubt summons for many hellish flashbacks of withered crops in Farmville; the anxiety-inducing countdown timers of social network games of the late 2000s.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios

It’s an instant turn-off for lots of people, even those predisposed to enjoy a game that markets itself as unforgiving. The developers have said they’re looking into how to tweak this mechanic. But to be honest, it’s the least of the problems I’ve encountered with the game: juddering frame rates, wacky bugs, borked network play, loot piles overlapping in a way that makes them impossible to distinguish from one another. This is as early access as early access can feasibly get.

A lot of the game is marketed on its striking environments, and I have to admit: there is much to like. Some maps are relatively small, like the “Scorched Enclave”, a trench-ridden frontline that becomes dense with flashpoints. These smaller maps are especially prone to spawn-ambushes and tight squeezes between patrols. Others, like the much grander “Ashen Mesa”, are expansive battlefields with plenty of striking vistas and variety. A wide city has been reduced to concrete crumbs, open fields of ash give way to cracked highways, which fall into a vertigo-inducing canyon. You can get to the other side of this canyon, but only by crossing the gargantuan spine of an ancient, long-dead megabot. The Forever Winter is good at making you feel small and vulnerable, even if some of that vulnerability comes from the fear of a zombie T-posing into existence randomly in front of you.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios

The artistry of the large scale scenery is somewhat offset by how chaotically laid out the maps are. This is a good-looking world, yet its level design feels cluttered and unclear. You will get waylaid and stuck on lots of rubble is what I’m saying. Exploring them for the first time, I found the maps don’t often “flow” or make a whole heap of sense.

This may be intentional, a case of “war makes geography untenable”. But I get the impression of a game where art and design have clashed. Artists like clutter, it makes things look detailed. Designers like tidiness, it makes routes clear for the player. For me, Forever Winter feels a touch too artistically messy. I was moving along routes and climbing material that was probably never intended to be used as a passageway, glitching through meshes and getting trapped in geometry because something in my primate brain said “go that way” even while the game didn’t expect it.

So far, it’s a game of poor affordances: good at looking the part, bad at communicating what it would like you to do. An example of form kicking function into the long grass. Imagine an interior designer was given the keys to the architect’s office and decided to have a go at designing a hotel instead of just dressing one. The result is an interesting-looking building with lots of space for rugs, but no fire escape or toilets.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios

It can be disappointing when a distinctive concept can’t keep up with the mechanical and technical necessities to deliver on its promise. Part of the challenge here is perhaps that there is something very un-gamelike about the Forever Winter at a conceptual level, in that much of it is about not interacting. You are encouraged to allow other factions to fight amongst themselves, rather than get involved yourself. Some principal verbs of the game are those of inaction: “do nothing” , “don’t engage”, “stay still”.

That’s 100% viable as games go. A clever stealth game can turn these verbs into tense moments within a larger game of hide and seek. And there are glimpses of that here. Sadly, The Forever Winter has some way to go before it can call its stealth chops fully sensible or readable. For the most part, enemies don’t notice you until you fire a shot. You can be three metres from them and they’ll often entirely ignore you, which can make attempts to stay hidden in cover feel a little pointless.

Image credit: Rock Paper Shotgun / Fun Dog Studios

Then all of a sudden they take a random interest and you’re the fish of the day at a restaurant for starving cats, with squads of troopers and wonkily animated helicopters raining hell upon your pre-corpse. There are predefined rules about the enemies behaviour (I can tell from the timed Metal Gear Solid quesion marks and exclams above their heads) but their sightlines and priorities are often unreadable and seemingly random. Once again, it feels like the game needs to communicate itself better.

The Forever Winter remains an interesting setting and being the little guy in a big war is an appealing premise. Those rare runs during which I felt the nervousness of survival deep in my gut were extremely promising. So I do hope it gets cleaned up during its early access scramble for survival. But right now it lacks clarity in its moment-to-moment play, and basic functionality in many other respects (see also: tank yeeting across the sky). Yes, it’s in early access, but our thinking at RPS is that of visiting a restaurant: if you can pay money for a meal, it ought to at least arrive warm. The Forever Winter has been served cold.