The Forever Winter Early Access Review – A Flawed But Decent Extraction Shooter

Since the release of Escape From Tarkov, the extraction shooter genre has largely been the realm of multiplayer games. While there are plenty of elements in the genre that have players take on AI enemies, a lot of the appeal for extraction shooter tends to come from the tension that players have to deal with since there’s always a possibility that the loot you worked hard to scavenge might be stolen by another player that happened to sneak into the area and kill you before you could even notice them.

It is curious, however, that few developers have tried to capitalize on the potential of the genre to offer up fun and interesting experiences to audiences that would prefer single-player or co-operative experiences. Most extraction shooters tend to emphasize their PvP aspects, and players that might prefer to go at it solo without having to worry about someone else definitely feel like an ignored audience.

"The core gameplay loop in The Forever Winter will be familiar to players that have experience with titles like Escape From Tarkov."

The Forever Winter is a relatively new title, having come out back in September as an Early Access release by veteran developers at Fun Dog Studios that hopes to capitalize on the single-player and co-operative aspects of extraction shooters by doubling down on the tension by going for a more horror-based approach to its art direction. In The Forever Winter, players are put into the shoes of a simple scavenger with little else to their name aside from a gun and some bullets, and are tasked with setting off in a post-apocalyptic world that has been so thoroughly ravaged by war that it’s impossible to tell who won and who lost.

The core gameplay loop in The Forever Winter will be familiar to players that have experience with titles like Escape From Tarkov; scavengers take on missions from various factions and set off into one of many available maps with one simple objective: get as much loot, be it new weapons, ammo, or even crucial supplies like water, and extract out of the map. Dying on one of these excursions means you lose pretty much everything you were carrying on you, including any fancy weapons you may have decided to bring along. Bit by bit, mission by mission, players are able to build out their arsenal, unlock new passive abilities like improved performance with specific weapon types, and better gears, making future outings on missions easier.

"Dying on one of these excursions means you lose pretty much everything you were carrying on you"

With this gameplay loop, taking on regular enemies that goes from being a nightmarish ordeal where you would be better off hiding than fighting them, to instead being simple obstacles that you can take out with a couple of bullets. To keep up with a player getting more powerful, the missions also start getting more challenging, tasking you with taking on tougher enemies like tanks, and even mech suits. In The Forever Winter, despite how powerful you might actually get, death is an inevitability, and the game feels like it was designed around the idea that players might have to restart their progression from scratch, which comes with the territory with extraction shooters.

When it comes to the moment-to-moment gameplay, The Forever Winter definitely has quite a bit of room for improvement. The core combat, while serviceable, doesn’t quite feel as good as it should from a game where just about every fight you get into is going to be ranged. Unless you make enough progress to be able to buy a replacement for your ironsights, you’re not going to find much in the way of accuracy either. The hit indicators also tend to feel off, since they take aspects like bullet drop into account. This means that you often don’t know if you’ve successfully shot an enemy until it’s too late; the enemy has heard your shot, has called for backup, and is now focusing their attention on taking you down.

The progression, on the other hand, doesn’t feel too bad. You start off with incredibly weak weapons, but as you start making deeper incursions into the game’s various levels and take on more challenging quests, you’ll start getting better weapons not only as loot, but also through your home base’s vendors that are constantly updating their stocks.

As it currently stands, the enemy AI in the game is a mixed bag. While it can often be quite impressive, with enemy soldiers using complex tactics to try and flush you out of cover you might be hiding behind, at other times, those same soldiers will end up running up to you in a straight line, letting you kill them one after another with well-placed headshots.

"To keep up with a player getting more powerful, the missions also start getting more challenging, tasking you with taking on tougher enemies like tanks, and even mech suits."

In fact, a lot of the game’s difficulty can be brought down by a considerable degree by simply teaming up with another player. There are obvious benefits to playing The Forever Winter in co-op, since all players get loot, you multiply your carrying capacity by the number of players in a mission, not to mention the fact that you can take on enemies with coordinated tactics.

The Forever Winter also takes a curious decision with one of the core resources that players set off to find: water. The game starts out with water being the singularly most important resource you can get for your base, with many base upgrades needing you to have a certain threshold of water to even become available to purchase. Interestingly, water is an ever-dwindling resource, to the extent where your base even has a giant screen to track how many days’ worth of water you have left. In fact, this resource also dwindles even if you’re not playing the game. Whether you decide to take a break from the game or keep playing every day, your water levels will go down, and once it hits zero, the concept of Water Death is kicked off.

In the game’s original incarnation from a couple of months ago, Water Death meant that you have basically failed, and would have to restart from scratch. This means losing essentially every form of progression you might have made in your playthrough, be it character levels, loot, or equipment for a base. At the time, while the concept of Water Death was a novel one, enough of the player base complained about being punished for simply taking a break from the game for a few weeks or a month, and the studio eventually changed up how the mechanic works.

"In fact, a lot of the game’s difficulty can be brought down by a considerable degree by simply teaming up with another player."

Outside of the water mechanics, progression as a whole in The Forever Winter feels quite solid. While it starts off as an incredibly challenging game, your character also improves with each successful extraction. This allows you to go into their skill trees and get improvements like the ability to have better aim and more damage with SMGs, for example. These improvements can also lean more on the utility side of things, such as the ability to carry more weight with you, allowing you to grab more stuff during a mission.

At the time of writing this review, Water Death means that a player who has run out of all water will find their base invaded the next time they play the game. This allows players the ability to fend off Water Death if they can successfully defend their base from this invasion. Failing to defend your base will still mean that you have to start over. However, the current version of Water Death is definitely an improvement over what it was earlier, since players now at least have the chance of hanging on to what they might have worked hard to procure.

This change in how Water Death works as a mechanic does highlight one key aspect of The Forever Winter: the studio does seem to have an ear on the pulse of what its players want. While the concept of a resource that dwindles even when the game is not being played is an idea the studio seems quite attached to, the fact that it took player complaints about losing all progress through no fault of their own to heart means that the studio is also likely looking to make other improvements to the game.

"The studio does seem to have an ear on the pulse of what its players want."

While most of the gameplay is filled with interesting ideas like various characters with unique abilities and an enthralling world with cool lore behind it, the game still wears its status as an Early Access title on its sleeves. The minute-to-minute gameplay, while fun and tense, still feels quite stiff. While this matches up with the idea that the player character is far from the concept of a super soldier that can easily use any weapon they pick up, the gunplay feels like it has just enough jankiness to it to make it feel rougher than it should be.

The Forever Winter absolutely nails one of its key aspects: art design. The post-apocalyptic world of the game is downright gorgeous in how horrifying things can look at times. While it doesn’t really abuse blood and gore as set dressing aside from a couple of rooms in the base, the game is still able to instill a sense of dread in players thanks to other aspects, including enemy designs and the world around them. The strange way some enemies move, the insane scale of the war that still happens to be going around for some reason, and some of the larger things out there, like massive AI automatons, all tend to make for an experience that is as cool to look at as it is terrifying to imagine.

The Forever Winter isn’t a game that’s shy about the fact that it’s in Early Access right now; in fact, the game seems to revel in it, constantly introducing refinements and new features through updates. While the game hasn’t been out for too long yet, the fact it has already seen a major revision to one of its key mechanics owing to player feedback, and the very fact that the studio is keeping an eye on what its players want bodes quite well for the future of the game. It offers a tense solo or co-op experience, with plenty of stakes since you can lose all the fancy loot you found by messing up just once. Coupled with gorgeous art direction and a terrifying setting, The Forever Winter is definitely something fans of co-op shooters want to keep their eye on.

This game was reviewed on PC.