The Forever Winter

jesus h christ where to start this game could be amazing, at times it has some A class atmosphere and immersion, the artwork and game world are absolutely incredible, as is the premise of the game. it is "fun" to play, sort of, in a way. not really. it has a little of of that "je ne sais quoi", that indefinable quality that is kind of good but you sorta dont know why you like it. it has some sort of weird rizz but oh my god do not buy this game in its current state, this game should not be for sale. it is fcking ridiculous that fundog put this out, in this state, and is asking money for it. let me explain. this game is the most janky piece of sht ive played in a good long while and ive played some sht. literally nothing works well or makes sense or functions smoothly, nothing. the UI is so bad, like i still cant figure out how to do real simple sht like outfit my character or find certain things that i know are in my stash or equip grenades bcos the UI and UX are austiscally dogsht. im a real stickler for a good UI and whoever came up with the UI for this game, i have an issue with the way your mind works. and the UI is indicative of everything else, all the systems, the gameplay and the AI. oh god, the AI. this game has some of the worst, most janky, most immersion breaking, unreliable, brainless AI ive seen ever in a game that actually functions. from the moment you meet the AI you get nothing but total jank. strange animations, totally nonsensical path tracing, you cant really gauge behaviours or learn or play around the AI bcos it is total nonsense 100% of the time. sometimes theyll literally walk right up to you and stand over you with their gun resting on your head and not see you, other times you move and they all come screaming over, sometimes they break from their normal path tracing and stand right in the middle of the way you have to go for no discernable reason, sometimes theyll know youre there but not be able to find you and youll just end up trapped bcos theyre wandering around aimlessly. sometimes theyll kill on sight, sometimes they wont, there is no rhyme or reason to any of it and it makes this particular game, with its design philosophy and design intent, completely unplayable in a way that feels anything but utterly ridiculous. its just a fcking jankfest, beginning to end. forever winter feels like a bunch of super talented artistic kids got together to make an art project, it does not feel like a game, i honestly dont know if itll ever be a game. it has some of the most incredible art design ive ever seen, when it works and the textures arent floating in midair again it looks unbelievably beautiful. but thats all it really is, its an art piece. at least atm. everything else is a complete mess. fundog should not have released this, im shocked that its been out for so long and ive just played it and its so bad right now. what tf was it like when they released it? fundog shouldnt have released it in the state its in right now but its too late for all that. they should have just had a demo with a couple of the empty maps out for ppl to explore, so that we could see the world theyre building and their artwork. then they should have had regular beta testing weekends where players could jump in and test things out. i know they needed the money to pay their staff and fund the project and i appreciate that 100%, i support workers everywhere but this borders on bad behaviour from fundog leadership. it is bad behaviour. im conflicted. and theyre releasing skin packs and sht, for a game that barely functions and where it does it does so badly. not really cool guys. i think fundog is flying by the seat of their pants with this one, a real "fake it to you make it" kinda deal. which is how it kind of works, right? but you shouldnt be charging good money when you're faking it. this game needs some serious, serious work in areas that i dont think are getting attention. they need to leave the artwork and the modelling and the map design alone for about 12 months and just focus on getting the fcking thing to play. sort out the AI, hire some experience if you have to. figure out the fcking UI bcos it is fcking dogsht. get the systems figured out and streamline the experience. improve the player movement and collison, it is not good atm, it feels like sludge and for a stealth game the movement and collison and vaulting etc needs to be top class. the gun play is also not good, ive experienced worse but that isnt a compliment. this game could be a genuine masterpiece but i dont think its going that way, i dont know if fundog has the experience or the ability to pull this massive feat off tbh. i feel bad but im being honest. as i said, art kids doing an art project. thats what forever winter feels like. i really hope im wrong and i genuinely wish fundog all the best, i hope they make me look fcking stupid, i hope they knock it out of the park. and theyve got my money now so i hope it fcking helps. if youre on the fence about this game just wait, trust me. unless you really wanna support fundog. give it another 12 - 18 months and see whats up then. if they dont have most of the sht ive just whined about under control in 18 months time then this game is just an art project that broke containment.

이 게임을 망설이는 사람들에게 얘기해주자면 내가 하고싶은게 끝없는 절망만 가득한 전쟁터에서 전쟁영웅이 되고 남자의 가슴을 두근거리게 하는 메카를 타고 뿌슝빠슝을 생각한다면 그런 게임아니니깐 망설이지말고 가던길 ㄱㄱ 이 게임을 플레이하는 우리는 그 무엇도 아닌 그냥 쓰레기 난민일뿐이고 전쟁을 지속하는 각 세력들에게 그저 지나가다 걸리적 거리면 밞아죽이는 개미새끼일뿐 또한 게임성도 출시초에 비해 많이 편의성이 개선되었지만 여전히 여타 게임들처럼 뉴비한테 친화적이고 기본적으로 뉴비가 게임에 적응할수 있는 발판을 차차 밞아가는 시스템 따위가 없음 그나마 게임 내 최상위 총들로 무장한 고인물이라해도 무쌍을 찍을수도 없거니와 찍는다 해도 우리같은 벌레보다 훨씬 강력한 애미뒤진 몹들이 많다 이 게임 아니 이 포에버윈터는 그냥 플레이할수있는 아트북에 가깝다 그럼에도 마더꼴리지가 시체를 수집하고 거대 메카가 총을쏘다 갑자기 집게로 날 들어서 생체배터리 팩에 저장하며 인간을 갈아넣어 만든 다양한 생체병기들과 숨바꼭질을 하고 거대 메카들이 치고박고 싸우며 끝없는 전투가 펼쳐지는 모습을 감상하고 싶다면 바로 구매해도 좋다 다시한번 말하지만 이건 게임이 아니다 매우 훌륭한 아포칼립스 아트북을 플레이가능하게 만든것일뿐

I wanna love you, The Forever Winter. I wanna marry you, have kids, watch them grow to early adulthood, send them off to college and grow old with you, The Forever Winter. I wanna love you, The Forever Winter. But you're still very janky, very buggy, and very unfinished.

The Forever Winter is dirty, unwelcoming, painful to look at, and I really like it. The game immediately hooks you with a deceptive sense of simplicity. The opening tunnels are relatively straightforward. You'll run into a handful of enemies, and dealing with them isn't particularly difficult. The game doesn't really reveal itself until you leave those sterile corridors behind. Outside is absolute hell. Without exaggeration, the world is one giant active war zone with very little room to maneuver. There are so many enemies that stealth becomes your primary means of survival. Fortunately, the different factions spend just as much time fighting each other as they do hunting you down, if not more, so you're often able to slip through the chaos unnoticed. The world itself is a burned-out wasteland built on the ruins of destroyed cities, covered in an almost painfully red color palette. You have very little health, die in seconds, and there are no shields or second chances. Death means losing everything you brought with you. To be fair game does have a Dark Souls-esk loot return system, but it's buggy and doesn't work properly. Combat is functional, but resources are always limited. Ammunition takes up a huge amount of inventory space, so you can never carry much of it, and your backpack barely has room for loot as it is. Speaking of loot, most of what you find is exactly that: junk. Scrap, broken equipment, random debris to sell later. That's essentially the gameplay loop of Forever Winter. To survive, you have to understand when to fight and when to disappear. Open combat rarely works in your favor, but careful positioning, using cover, picking enemies off one by one, and avoiding stronger opponents gives you a chance. The game does an excellent job of making you feel insignificant. You're not some legendary soldier. You're just another scavenger crawling across an active battlefield while armies and giant war machines settle their own conflicts around you. Your only hope is to pick through whatever scraps they leave behind. That atmosphere is easily the game's greatest strength. It's strangely beautiful in its hopelessness, another case of finding beauty in something ugly. The actual gameplay during raids is solid too. Enemy AI can be questionable at times, and the shooting isn't nearly as responsive as something like Helldivers or ARC Raiders, but it's reliable enough that most deaths feel like your own fault rather than the game's. The music is excellent, although I'd argue it comes dangerously close to imitation rather than inspiration. The soundtrack clearly takes heavy influence from Silent Hill and, even more noticeably, Cyberpunk 2077. I genuinely like the music, but there are moments where it feels a little too familiar. The worldbuilding, is just fantastic. I really like that the conflict is still built around recognizable nations and political alliances rather than completely fictional factions. It makes the setting feel disturbingly believable. Character dialogue is surprisingly strong. Everyone has their own way of speaking and their own worldview, even if they're all understandably miserable. The only artistic choice I never really warmed up to is the character artwork and design. This is entirely subjective, but while I love the environmental art direction, I really dislike the character portraits. I understand the intention. People surviving the end of the world shouldn't look glamorous. But to me they don't look like desperate survivors. They look like a group of homeless people standing around a burning barrel. The artist is clearly talented, and I don't mean any disrespect. The style simply doesn't work for me. Unfortunately, the game is also full of major flaws. Movement and traversal are easily the weakest part of the entire game. It's obvious that the developers were aiming for the fluidity of ARC Raiders, but they completely miss the mark. Every character feels awkward to control, and navigating the ruined city is a constant struggle. Walking along intended paths works well enough, but the moment you try climbing onto higher ground, taking an unusual route, or finding a creative hiding spot, the game falls apart. Collision is terrible. You constantly get caught on debris, clip into geometry, or discover invisible objects blocking your path. This goes well beyond the usual "it's Early Access" excuse. In its current state, traversal simply wasn't ready to be put into players' hands, and fixing it should be the developers' highest priority. The base interface has a similar problem. I understand what they were going for. Everything is supposed to feel dirty, rusty, oppressive, and uncomfortable. That works during actual gameplay. It doesn't work when you're trying to organize your inventory. Managing your stash, buying items, and navigating menus constantly feels like you're fighting the interface instead of using it. Since the game is still in Early Access, this is easier to forgive, but it's still something that absolutely needs attention. Another issue is the value of loot itself. Almost everything you find is just more junk to sell. You aren't discovering exciting weapons or rare equipment. You're carrying around scrap after surviving some incredibly difficult encounters, only to sell it for relatively little. Considering how brutal extractions can be, the rewards simply don't feel satisfying enough and the economy could use some balancing pass. The reputation system is just a missed opportunity. There are several factions in the game, with three of them actively fighting each other throughout every mission. The system itself is wonderfully simple. Killing soldiers from one faction improves your standing with the others, while the Scavengers are essentially your own people and remain friendly throughout most of the game. The problem is that reputation barely changes anything. Higher reputation only gives you discounts at faction vendors. That's literally all it does. The same faction that calls you a friend at the shop will still shoot you on sight during missions. They won't ignore you, help you, or even hesitate before attacking. It's ridiculous that defending yourself against a faction that attacked you first actually lowers your reputation with them. It feels like the system is missing half of its intended functionality. I mentioned that briefly above but game is also extremely buggy. I'm not exaggerating when I say it feels like it's constantly falling apart. Items sometimes disappear after you pick them up. Equipment you brought into a raid occasionally vanishes from both your inventory and your stash. Enemies clip underground. You get stuck inside rocks and buildings. Sometimes successful extractions simply fail, delete all of your loot, and throw you back into another raid instead. The list goes on. While awkward menus can at least be blamed on questionable design decisions, this amount of technical problems simply can't. Early Access explains unfinished features. It doesn't excuse a game constantly breaking in ways that make you lose progress. At the end of the day, Forever Winter is a game that's very difficult not to admire, but equally difficult to recommend. Its atmosphere, worldbuilding, and overall art direction do an incredible amount of heavy lifting, and the core gameplay during raids is genuinely enjoyable. Unfortunately, the technical state of the game is simply too poor. It's hard to recommend a game that constantly fights the player on a technical level, especially when the developers are already selling cosmetic DLC instead of spending that effort improving stability. I genuinely hope the game gets there one day. In its current state, though, I just can't recommend it.

HOW?! How can you have such a great looking and atmospheric game and have the most abysmal and inconsistent gameplay of all time?! Sometimes you fall through the map and die, I can deal with occassional unpolished EA bugs and glitches...even though you have to spend huge amounts of money to restock all the equipment you just lost because of a bug. Sometimes you shoot an enemy point blank in the face with a shotgun and they go down and sometimes you shoot over and over and hit absolutely nothing. Enemies either zerg you to death, relentlessly, sometimes with never ending spawn rates or they walk right up to you and don't even notice you. Why make the game so punishing if you know that the product is unfinished and there are major bugs? It feels like you hate the players who invest in the product. I really want to enjoy this game, but currently it is nowhere near ready for a 1.0 release. It needs some MAJOR functionality updates.

You shouldn't sell a game when you're really trying to sell an artbook. Some of the highest potential in a game I've seen, almost completely squandered. I'd like to hold hope that they'll actually improve the game but, after watching the game from day one to now, it's gotten nothing but bloat instead of meaningful fixes. Not to mention the multiple DLC when the game is so far from a properly playable state leaves a poor impression, even if it's ostensibly to fund development. I'd like to see this game succeed and reach its fullest potential, but I can't realistically hold onto that hope, and above all, I absolutely cannot recommend someone buy it in the current state, even if it is much better than it was day one.

its a great game. now fix it. until the devs debug this beautiful mess, just go on ahead and save your money. bugs were constant once hitting anything past tunnel C.

TL;DR, the game's visuals and lore are amazing, but the gameplay is bad, lots of bugs, bad AI and extremely high difficulty. The game is AMAZING. The worldbuilding and graphics are superb, and I'm in love with the enemy designs. You are a civilian trapped between the endless war of three megafactions, and you must scavenge junk to sell, food or medkits to heal, and weapons & ammo to stay alive next run. All while avoiding towering mechs, powerful tanks, swarming drones, zombielike cyborgs and more. But the gameplay is just...bad. It's extremely broken, with the rig inventory management not displaying the proper volume, inputs like healing being delayed, the AI is very buggy and its very common to find enemies stuck in one place (sometimes the only entrance/exit point). The difficulty is abhorrently high and the core mechanic of being stealthy doesn't work when you'll just get cornered by five soldiers, three drones and an exosuit, so you get mown down and lose several minutes, sometimes hours of loot & quest progress. "You are not the supersoldier, you are the lowly scavenger" philosophy also doesn't apply to this when the game gives you machine guns, snipers, and even a tank-destroying railgun. I adore how the game looks, and its lore. But it's better off as a movie than a game. And even with so many damn hotfixes, it's extremely buggy.

The game is incredibly interesting in design and idea, however it's extremely glitchy at the moment, which I really hope changes over time, cause I'd love to play this game with a really well done AI and balancing rework. For now however, it's just not there yet. However I'm keeping an eye out.

Way too buggy and not worth playing in its current state.