I spent an hour swearing, fleeing and dying in the machine-infested battlefields of The Forever Winter and cannot wait to do it again

GamesThird Person ShooterThe Forever WinterI spent an hour swearing, fleeing and dying in the machine-infested battlefields of The Forever Winter and cannot wait to do it againWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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Declaration of War - The Forever Winter EA Announcement - YouTubeWatch On

Declaration of War - The Forever Winter EA Announcement - YouTube

As I walk across what I initially assume are some rocks, but are in fact countless petrified cadavers, I use the scavenged head of a cyborg to scan my surroundings. Amid the sea of neutral green are two red silhouettes lying still on the ground—not corpses, but cyborgs with their legs blown off, yet still active and deadly. They can’t see us, as we’re hidden behind towers of gore and bone. We sensibly head in the opposite direction.

In The Forever Winter, letting rip with the game’s myriad firearms is often the very last thing you’ll do before an army of machines and soldiers descends upon you. “One important rule is: don’t shoot unless you have to,” design director Jeff Gregg warns me as we sneak through rows of tombstones. It’s like “ringing the dinner bell”. But my AK-47 will still see some use very soon.

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

The Forever Winter screenshot

We get to some destroyed fortifications and, out of a cloud of dust and sparks, some more cyborgs appear, crawling in our direction. Williams plans to take them out using a suppressor, but they clock us. Symbols above them denote if they’re investigating or fully hostile, as well as if they’re losing interest. These ones are not losing interest. Williams opens fire and I follow suit. They’re not too tough, but we’ve made a racket. A much larger machine, Mother Courage, has taken notice. And reinforcements are coming from behind us.

There’s swearing, a bit of panic, and a lot of running. Williams thinks we’re safe, but then a bomber appears overhead and we’re separated from Gregg. “Don’t wait for me,” he says. “Don’t wait for me,” he repeats. We continue running. Another moment of safety, and room to breathe. Gregg manages to catch up, but we quickly encounter more crawlers. Williams fires at a cyborg—one still in possession of its legs—in the other direction, the screen lights up with alerts and all hell breaks loose.

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

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(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

The Forever Winter screenshot

Then there’s the water situation. This is the most essential resource, and when my hub runs out completely the area is reset, costing all of the practical and cosmetic enhancements I’ve made, and my inventory will be gutted. Even before then, when it’s critically low, some services become unavailable. And this all happens in real-time.

“One of the things that actually came up in our beta, that we’re keeping, is that the water level has real-time degradation,” says Gregg. “If you and I log off with 10 days left and you come back three days from now, you’ll have seven days left, even if you haven’t played. It’s a hardcore game, you can build up a large surplus, but that is actually part of our co-op: to make sure people help each other.”

Players can share water and other supplies to help the less fortunate out, but otherwise it seems harsh, even if good players are able to fill their water level quickly. If I go on holiday for a week, I don’t want my base to revert back to its most basic form and lose everything. But it’s also very much in keeping with the stress-inducing desperation that the game is constantly trying to evoke. And I should note that you keep things like character progression: all the skills you’ve earned from XP. So you never have to start completely fresh.

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

The Forever Winter screenshot

Friendly fire is also active, which is a bold choice for a strictly co-op game, but one we’ve seen work very well before, most recently in Helldivers 2. Here, it forces you to be even more cautious when firing off some rounds, but it’s also led to unexpected emergent player behaviour during the beta.

“If it’s a low drop rate enemy, and everyone worked together to take it, we’ve seen players turn on each other and kill each other because they wanted the loot from that drop,” Williams recalls. “It’s the antithesis of what we intended, but we’ve literally seen friendlies gun each other down to get these rare parts, and then take those rare parts and fucking extract. It’s brutal.”

Seeing this happen inspired the team to put an in-game penalty in place to discourage people from doing this too often, even if it makes for exciting moments. This sort of treachery tanks your scav rating, with the survivors losing faith in you. Gregg says “it’s a choice you can make”, and Fun Dog doesn’t want to stop players from doing something that actually matches the game’s desperate tone, but it wants to make it a difficult choice. Betrayal shouldn’t be without consequences.

Corpse run

Our attempt to get our lost gear back goes badly, but not straight away. The dynamic nature of the battlefield starts in our favour this time. The machines and human soldiers are locked in an infinite war and carry out objectives while players scrounge in the detritus of human civilisation. Most of the time, you’re beneath their notice. So you might be able to sneak through the battlefield without drawing any attention to yourself. Thus, I’m able to fill my rig—a customisable backpack that can be swapped out for more advanced versions—with all sorts of tat. Whisky, toys, dossiers, scrap—everything I can find.

The act of looting itself involves some decision making. When you select a crate or a fallen foe, it takes a few seconds for its entire inventory to be revealed, simulating the time it takes to rifle around for the good stuff. You can just loot everything in one go, but that will quickly fill up your rig with junk, necessitating a bunch of inventory management, during which you might get a bullet to the head.

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

The Forever Winter screenshot

After filling our rigs and outrunning some cyborgs, we make it to the site of our earlier deaths. It’s quiet. I pick up my dropped loot, look up, and then I see it: a massive mech bristling with guns. At first it’s entirely motionless and I wonder if it’s a wreck.It is not a wreck. “Oh shit, oh shit,” Williams yells. We leg it as fast as we can. Alerts go off in every direction, but we’re close to the extraction point—we just need to make it inside a pipe. Williams gets in first, just as Gregg warns him that “there’s stuff in the pipe”. All I hear is “Jesus Christ!” before Williams is toast. I soon follow him, and Gregg, now out of ammo, joins us seconds later.

We decide to try our luck on another map. In total I get to see three of them, each distinct but oozing with nightmarish post-apocalyptic vibes. Ruined cities with pillars of corpses and huge machines looming over them. Gore-filled trenches evoking a horrifying sci-fi vision of World War I. A desert where mobile factories slowly coast through the sand. The future sections of the Terminator series are obviously a big inspiration, but there’s an unnerving, monstrous beauty to some of the scenes.

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

We survive the chaotic battle and get a nice haul after looting the machine corpses. But we’re in trouble now. We’ve made ourselves a big target with all that noise, and now we have to run across an open area, and then along a huge makeshift bridge, before we can get to the extraction point. We sprint as fast as we can, but Gregg, with his massive and very full rig, is struggling to keep up with us. We can’t stop, though. Even though we’ve put a lot of distance between us and our foes, mech snipers have a lot of range. I go down, but Williams heals me before I’m knocked out for good. On the other side of the bridge there are more cyborgs waiting, but we fight through them and all three of us make it to the extraction.

Those hairy final moments were my fault. As a treat, I used the debug menu to give myself a huge stack of cash, with which I purchased a massive anti-tank gun. This put a target on all of our backs. “It’s because you were using that damn anti-tank rifle,” Williams explains as we laugh about our incredibly close call. “So the way that their aggro is set up is like the bigger the artillery we bring in, the more interest the enemies take in us.” And they were very interested.

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

This playthrough really just scratched the surface. In May, I spoke with Williams aboutThe Forever Winter’s dynamic warand what Fun Dog has in store for us: the way missions have consequences, changing both how your fellow survivors perceive you and how the warring armies react; the boss-like fights against machines that have reactive armour and stealth systems; the epic clashes between the AI factions—there’s a lot more that I want to see. And I’ll be able to soon, because The Forever Winter is hitting early access on September 24.

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