Video review

So on Sep 24th, I embarked on my The Forever Winter (TFW) journey. I didn’t set my expectations high for an early access title in terms of optimization or the absence of in-game bugs. At start. the game offered to link my Epic account for cross-play with users on another platform but since most of my friends are on Steam I skipped that option. I know some people were wondering if Epic client is mandatory to play game the game and I can assure you – it is completely optional.

There’s not much lore given after the game starts so if you never heard about the game before, I’d recommend watching at least the game trailer to get an idea of the game.


I was curious what the first quest prepared for me looked like, anticipating something between reaching a certain point on the map to perform a task or maybe killing some low-profile enemies. To my surprise, the quest-giving NPC was brutal and told me he doesn’t have any hope I can actually be useful so if I just go on extraction and come back alive, that would fulfil the quest! Wait, so there’s no 10-minute long unskippable dialogue about how unique am I? And that to prove my god-send power I need to fetch 5 wolf skins first? What? WTF? A noname scavenger whose sole purpose is to just go out and survive long enough to return? Well, that should be a piece of cake, isn’t it? I did on my first mission because I was not attentive enough and got noticed by a group of soldiers when looting someone’s dead body. They didn’t think twice and emptied their magazines into my poor scavs body! This got me extremely frustrated because all the loot is lost upon death and the only thing you can retrieve on the following run are the weapon modifications you were carrying. If you had any. And if you can actually get to your dead body first. Since I haven’t had any gun modifications, my second run was something in the run-forest-run style - slowly crouching among the building and then running as fast as I could in between the open areas.


I have to admit game looks absolutely stunning and way more immersive than you could imagine from watching the game trailers. The aesthetics of the post-apocalyptic world, grim sky and bad visibility make it really breathtaking. Enemies are talking to each other, and sounds of huge mechs blasting tanks and helicopters and ripping apart soldiers, walking cyborgs and zombies are done really well. The game’s soundtrack is just a cherry on the cake of those ruined cities and a world without a future. With that said, my expectations about the game’s optimization - or lack of it - were met 100%. Even though I have quite a decent PC, playing the game at 4k resolution with an ultra setting rarely gives me above 30 frames per second. So after trying a few missions, I had to downgrade to medium setting across the board and FPS jumped about 100 right away.


I’d like to make another reference to the Gothic series here. All enemies have their own objectives and they pay absolutely no attention to a no-name scavenger. As long as you are not trying to loot their dead comrades' bodies in front of them, open fire or just try to interfere, they will unlikely get distracted. However, that’s not the case with hordes of walking dead cyborg-like zombies, that are wandering across the map and looking for their next victim. Finally, there are huge mechs and other massive threats - tanks, helicopters or drones - which don’t really care if you get hurt or dead in between their operations. Enemy AI has still space for improvement both in its behaviour and ability to get stuck in front of an obstacle with no action after that. Sometimes enemies slide like on an ice ring and make other crazy random movements getting glitched but I was so focused on staying alive that it didn’t bother me enough to break the immersion.


I’m pretty sure most bugs will be fixed by devs in the upcoming patches, so it’s not my concern. What would make me willingly embark on that extraction again and again? I enjoyed the survival part of the game: staying alive and getting extracted is your primary objective. Even if you were not able to collect decent loot or complete your quest objective, extracting alive will still give you some experience which you can spend to improve your skills or increase your character prestige level. Prestige grants you more HP, capacity and occasionally improved walking speed at the price of getting all your skills reset. It’s quite an interesting mechanic and you also have a few different characters with unique specialiazation to choose between. What I also felt was decent was the gunplay - those rare occasions when you shoot someone (or something) down, starting with some basic rifle and eventually improving it with modifications and better equipment were cool and I was returning to get more. I’m curious to try more maps and complete quests from different factions, some of them being in conflict so you can’t really please them all. I am excited to spend earned money and get my base decorated.


The first downside came from the base decoration itself. Having farmed over 100k credits, I decided to build a dog shelter. To my surprise, I couldn’t pet the dog and it was the most game-breaking experience I had in Forever Winter. I’d like to use this opportunity and urge Fun Dog (you also noticed DOG in their title, did you?) to get this fixed asap.

My second struggle was the game’s interface. Usually, you don’t have much time to loot the bodies and need to move fast in order to stay unnoticed. Well, Forever Winter makes it difficult when several bodies are around. On top of that, getting equipped prior to the mission and understanding which modifications you can purchase for which weapons is not the most intuitive right now and I hope developers will pay more attention to the interface and interacting with in-game objects. Having a button to sell all junk and get your hard-earned credits would be lifesaver, too.


Two things I have no strong opinion about. It’s the water system and the content variety. Let’s start with the water system. TFW forces you to collect and refill water at your base station. It’s not difficult to extract water, what’s a lot of people are talking about is that your water level eventually declines. Once it reaches zero, your base station will be wiped out and you will lose all your extracted loot. I have very limited time during the week to play in general and I felt like it might create issues for players who can’t commit enough time. On the other hand, stocking enough water is an option and you can even upgrade your water tank capacity to increase the number of days before your camp wipes out. I believe the developers did a good thing they went and released this to gather enough feedback early and I’m anticipating they will come up with some change before they release TFW free demo on October 8th.

Another thing I can’t talk much about right now is the content variety. I can see there are multiple weapons to try, a few different characters to level up and like a dozen of maps to explore (some of them are still locked). However, is Forever Winter going to have hundreds of hours of replayability, like other games in this genre or other indie game gems we’ve seen from small studios like Valheim? It’s too early to say and I’m planning to spend the upcoming weekend exploring other Forever Winter regions and trying out all the characters.

For those who are on edge whether you want to pay around $30 - I’d recommend waiting for the upcoming free demo, especially if you don’t have a powerful PC to play right now when developers are working on optimization as a priority.