War-torn sci-fi extraction shooter The Forever Winter has had a chaotic launch into early access. For those unfamiliar with the game, this third-person hellish journey sees players roam the battlefields of an endless conflict between three major world powers. Robots ignore you in favor of passing by and destroying enemy soldiers. Insect-like drones hover overhead in search of prey. And terrifying mother harvesters pick corpses from the rubble. As a collection of images, it’s a powerful thing. As a game you can play with three friends, it’s very tough and not just off the edges.
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Forever Winter is like the Dark Zone of Escape From Tarkov or The Division. Just use “PvEvEvE” instead of “PvPvE.” You have a base called “Innards,” where you prepare for your trips to open maps of various sizes. You search the bodies of fallen enemies for loot: ammo, weapon attachments, floppy disks that can be sold for cash, toolboxes, cybernetic debris. You don't have much space in your “rig” (a large steel backpack), so you have to prioritize and fulfill bandit requests, often from different factions.
For example, a mission might ask you to retrieve parts that have been stripped from “European drones.” One option is to take these savage drones on yourself and fire your weak rounds into the air to try and penetrate their tiny bodies. At that point, you become an obvious target. Nearby enemies will also be looking for gunfire, and before you know it, you're surrounded by cyberzombies and tactical SWAT bastards who all see you as enemies. Survival in these scenarios is usually a matter of running away and hoping you don't get blown apart by a helicopter that suddenly appears to join in on the murder festivities.
Or! You can sneak around for a moment. Factional factions patrol the landscape (often unpredictably) and frequently encounter each other. Inevitably, your desired drones will crash and (if you’re lucky) find themselves blown up. If you can retrieve them without being seen, the remains are yours. Reach an extraction point and bring all the loot home. Die and you’re sent back to HQ empty-handed and all your gear stranded on the battlefield (though you can recover them Souls-style).
Conceptually, it’s a welcome change from the Tarkov formula. And sometimes an expedition to Ethernowar feels like being a little guy in a much larger conflict, hoping not to be immediately annihilated. I felt the thrill of coming out of the trenches once or twice, such as when I made the desperate decision to engage in a firefight with an army of mecha-undead near the landing. I only had a handful of shotgun shells left, but I had to take the risk. I barely escaped.
Unfortunately, both the illusion of a grand battle and the tension of a larger threat are frequently shattered by the game's faulty structure and molasses-like movement. For example, the player character feels suitably heavy to handle (you're carrying a large metal backpack). But he's painfully slow to move around, and has a very “railroady” run, with zero room for crawling movement. Something that can be useful for avoiding the many uneven rocks, rebar, and pieces of rubble that your character can get stuck in. This isn't “regular” terrain.
The enemies are similarly jerky, often turning jerkily or sliding across the ground as if they were wearing a pair of Heelys. Squads of bad guys appear incredibly close and spray your fragile bodies with surprise bullets long before you can dodge or return fire. Big mechs freeze and do nothing, then spring to life without warning. Tanks are especially funny, driving boldly into obstacles and doing donuts like a kid's racer in a small-town parking lot late at night. During one of my outings, three enemy soldiers were gunning down a tank. It was probably enraged, farting a huge cloud of smoke and hurtling wildly into the sky like a plastic toy being thrown across a bedroom floor. War is hell. Or maybe it's just funny as hell.
There's another quirk that's upsetting some players. You need to fill your HQ with enough water for your residents to survive. This means finding barrels of water in the wastes and prioritizing their extraction before other, more exciting loot, such as lockboxes that you can sell for cash or “gacha” chests filled with unknown trinkets that you can open once you get home. If you run out of water, your HQ is effectively dead and you lose everything you've stored – everything you've collected so far has evaporated.
That doesn't sound too bad on its own, and it fits the theme of survival in a harsh world. The kicker is that water runs out in real time, even when you're not playing. This will no doubt bring back hellish memories of the wilted crops in Farmville and the anxiety-inducing countdown timers of late-2000s social networking games.
It's an immediate turn-off for many people, even those who tend to enjoy a game that markets itself as brutal. The developers have said they're looking into how to tweak this mechanic. But honestly, that's the least of the problems I've encountered with the game: shaky frame rates, crazy bugs, broken network play, indistinguishable piles of loot that overlap. This is as early access as early access is possible.
Much of the game is marketed around its stunning environments, and I have to admit there’s a lot to like. Some maps are relatively small, like “Scorched Enclave”, a frontline packed with intense firefights. These smaller maps are particularly prone to spawn ambushes and patrol fights. Others, like the much grander “Ashen Mesa”, are vast battlefields with plenty of stunning scenery and variety. A vast city has been reduced to a sliver of concrete, ash-strewn open spaces replaced by cracked highways that drop into a dizzying canyon. You can only reach the other side of this canyon by crossing the massive spine of an ancient, long-dead megabot. Forever Winter is good at making you feel small and vulnerable, even if some of that vulnerability comes from the fear of being randomly T-boned by a zombie in front of you.
The artistry of the grand-scale landscape is somewhat offset by how chaotically the maps are laid out. It's a beautiful-looking world, but the level design feels cluttered and vague. You'll get cut off and stuck on a lot of rubble, that's what I mean. When I was first exploring these, I found that the maps often didn't “flow” or make a ton of sense.
This may be intentional, a case of “war makes the geography untenable”. But I get the impression that this is a game where art and design clash. Artists like clutter, making everything look detailed. Designers like order, making routes clear to the player. Forever Winter feels a little too artistically cluttered to me. I kept navigating routes that were probably not intended to be passages, and I kept stumbling over materials and webs that I was climbing, and getting trapped by geometry because something in my primate brain was telling me to “go that way” even though the game didn't expect it.
So far, it’s a game of poor means: good at looking the part, bad at communicating what it’s asking you to do. It’s a case of form kicking function into the long grass. Imagine an interior designer given the keys to an architect’s office and deciding to design a hotel rather than just dress it up. The result is a quirky-looking building with plenty of room for carpets but no fire escape or toilet.
A distinctive concept can be disappointing when it can't live up to the mechanical and technical requirements to deliver on its promise. Part of the challenge here is perhaps that Forever Winter feels nothing like a game on a conceptual level, because for the most part, it is. Negative interaction. You are encouraged to let other groups fight among themselves rather than getting involved yourself. Some of the game's basic verbs are verbs of inaction: “do nothing,” “don't interfere,” “remain still.”
In terms of gameplay, this is 100% doable. A clever stealth game can turn these actions into tense moments in a larger game of hide-and-seek. And there are hints of that here. Unfortunately, The Forever Winter has a ways to go before you can call its stealth skills entirely reasonable or readable. For the most part, enemies won't even notice you until you fire a shot. You can be ten feet away from them and they'll often ignore you completely, making attempts at cover feel a little pointless.
Then suddenly they show a random interest and you're the catch of the day in a restaurant for hungry cats, while troops of soldiers and strangely animated helicopters rain down hell on your front corpse. There are predefined rules about how enemies behave (I can tell from the timed Metal Gear Solid question marks and exclamation marks above their heads), but their field of view and priorities often seem illegible and random. Once again, it feels like the game needs to communicate itself better.
Forever Winter continues to be an interesting setting, and being the little guy in a big war is an appealing premise. Those rare runs where I felt the tension of survival in my gut were incredibly promising. So I hope it gets cleaned up during the survival campaign in early access. But it currently lacks clarity in its immediate gameplay and many other basic functionalities (see also: flying tanks in the sky). Yes, it's in early access, but our idea at RPS is like going to a restaurant: If you can afford a meal, it should at least be hot. Forever Winter was served cold.