If you haven’t heard the name Forever Winter in the past few months, someone on YouTube may have recommended a video about the game to you. The name may not be easy to remember, but the main slogan of “You’re Not That One” has undoubtedly attracted the attention of many science fiction fans.
Forever Winter is a third-person shooter that’s part extraction shooter, part survival game, set in a war-torn world where humans aren’t a key player in the conflict. Players are simply trying to grab whatever resources they can while trying to avoid fighting their own conflicting armies.
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This particular kind of publicity got many players excited in the lead-up to Forever Winter’s release. The game officially launched in Steam Early Access on Tuesday, with concurrent players on Steam peaking at just over 12,000.
Unfortunately, many people who decided to play the game were disappointed, and some were even surprised by the way certain survival mechanics were implemented. According to most people, this is a Very This early version of the game had a lot of rough design edges and unoptimized performance.
The game currently has a “Mixed” review rating on Steam, based on reviews from over 500 players. Unfortunately, the most common complaints are about the elements of the game that make players excited to play.
From the time giant war machines roamed the game world, many players complained that their artificial intelligence simply wasn’t enough. Reviews talk about enemies running in circles, following a predictable routine that reduces immersion – and most importantly: an uncanny ability to spot players through walls and kill them.
Much of the gameplay in Forever Winter revolves around the ongoing skirmishes between the stealth game’s factions. Your player character is too weak and poorly equipped to do anything but dodge danger, so it’s extremely frustrating to be discovered and die without understanding why.
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The biggest source of criticism, however, is one of the game’s survival mechanics. More specifically, everything revolves around collecting water and maintaining an adequate water supply. Water is necessary for both survival and game progression, as having enough unlocks the merchant in your underground hideout and expands what it can offer you between runs.
However, if you run out of water, everything you’ve done is gone. NPCs die, hideouts fall into ruins, and you even lose items and materials you’ve accumulated over multiple runs. The only thing you don’t lose is XP, which means water acts as a reset/rogue-lite mechanic.
Some reviews stated that the current state of the mechanics creates unnecessary anxiety and encourages “FOMO” because water consumption is reduced instantly rather than in-game time. In other words, if you don’t log in regularly to keep your water supply full, you’ll lose all your progress. This is somewhat similar to how some survival games require members of any given clan to be online at all times to defend against attacks.
In addition to these criticisms, many players noted that the action and gameplay felt particularly “clunky”. Of course, some of the lack of smoothness in the animations is intentional given the subject matter, but it seems like most players just want each moment to be more predictable.
Forever Winter’s Early Access journey has just begun, and the developers seem to have taken note of player feedback, so there’s a good chance we’ll witness fundamental changes to the core game in the coming months.
