The winter of our discontent

Wartorn sci-fi extraction shooterThe Forever Winterhas had a messy launch into early access.

Mechs stomp past you, ignoring you in favour of decimating enemy soldiers.

Bug-like drones hover overhead, scanning for prey.

A mech walks into battle on the horizon as the player moves forward in an orange haze.

And horrifyingmommy harvestersscavenge bodies from the debris.

As a collection of imagery, it’s powerful stuff.

The Forever Winter’s likeEscape From Tarkov, or the Dark Zone of theDivisiongames.

Cover image for YouTube video

Just swap “PvPvE” for the letters “PvEvEvE”.

A quest might ask you to bring back parts stripped from “Europan drones”, for example.

At this point you become an open target.

A control room hangs suspended above a huge drop, with a short metal bridge leading to it.

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 player hides from a dangerous mech that is firing at unseen foes.

The remnants are yours, if you might grab them without being seen.

Make it to an extraction point, and you bring all the loot home.

Conceptually, it is a nice twist on the Tarkov formula.

A menu screen shows illustrations of the six characters you can pick in The Forever Winter.

I got out, barely.

This is not a “tidy” space.

Big mechs freeze and do nothing, then splort to life without warning.

The player moves through an ash-filled landscape of ruins.

In one of my wanderings, a tank was being shot by three enemy troopers.

Or maybe just funny as hell.

There’s another quirk that has upset some players.

A menu screen shows what guns and ammo the player can take into their expedition.

you gotta keep your HQ stocked with enough water for the citizens of your homehole to survive.

The kicker is: water depletes in real time, even when you’re not playing the game.

The developers have said they’re looking into how to tweak this mechanic.

A huge robotic arm stretches over a canyon.

This is as early access as early access can feasibly get.

These smaller maps are especially prone to spawn-ambushes and tight squeezes between patrols.

The artistry of the large scale scenery is somewhat offset by how chaotically laid out the maps are.

The player hides from two soldiers who fire at a tank.

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.

This may be intentional, a case of “war makes geography untenable”.

The player looks down into a factory where a twisted machine corpse erupts from the wall.

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.

Three players gather in the subterranean headquarters of their scavenger faction.

For me, Forever Winter feels a touch too artistically messy.

An example of form kicking function into the long grass.

The result is an interesting-looking building with lots of space for rugs, but no fire escape or toilets.

You are encouraged to allow other factions to fight amongst themselves, rather than get involved yourself.

That’s 100% viable as games go.

A cleverstealth gamecan turn these verbs into tense moments within a larger game of hide and seek.

And there are glimpses of that here.

For the most part, enemies don’t notice you until you fire a shot.

Once again, it feels like the game needs to communicate itself better.

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.

The Forever Winter has been served cold.