The Forever Winter is a looter shooter set amid a dynamic war between building-sized mechs, where firing your gun could be the biggest mistake you make

GamesThird Person ShooterThe Forever WinterThe Forever Winter is a looter shooter set amid a dynamic war between building-sized mechs, where firing your gun could be the biggest mistake you makeWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

The Forever Winter is not your typical looter shooter power fantasy, where you rush around gobbling up loot so you can grow into a powerhouse. You’re a nobody. A desperate scavenger looting corpses while titanic machines conduct a war that’s consumed the world. You’re not trying to fight them; you’re just trying to survive, and bring what you scavenge back to regular folk who are hiding from the devastation.

First announced with agrim cinematic trailerin February, developer Fun Dog has today given us our first proper look at its post-apocalyptic nightmare, with its miserable scavengers scurrying between burning, monolithic structures and looting the detritus of a fallen civilization—all under the shadow of huge mechs fighting their never-ending war. The gameplay trailer does not paint a pretty picture of the future.

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

A squad looking out over the battlefield

This is not a game full of heroics. While the four-player squads will face androids and even some human infantry that they’ll be able to take down, one of those huge mechs is going to easily be able to wipe them out—and they’re facing not one but two armies full of these seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Bigger fish

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

A player sneaking up to a huge mech

The two warring factions don’t really care about your group of survivors at first, though. They’re busy with the war, with dynamic objectives playing out as you do your own thing. You won’t be encountering random mobs of enemies that spawn in to give you something to fight; instead you’ll encounter organised fire teams on missions. Maybe you’ll bump into some APCs on patrol, or a clash of the titans with gargantuan mechs tearing chunks out of each other. And, notes Williams, “sometimes crazy shit happens where it has unintended consequences”.

And if we do go into that fight, everybody’s fucking dead—like you and your friends are toast.Miles Williams, Fun Dog Studios CEO

And if we do go into that fight, everybody’s fucking dead—like you and your friends are toast.

Every enemy technically has hit points, but they also could have reactive armour, stealth systems and all sorts of countermeasures, so a ragtag group of survivors ain’t going to stand a chance when the factions wheel out the big boys. If you do bump into one of the behemoths, you’re just going to have to hope you’re not noticed.

“So for him his POV is like, he’s more of like a Godzilla/King Kong type unit,” says Williams. “We’re not trying to create a situation where you’re just plugging away at the [weak spots] on the boss. This thing got deployed for a specific reason, which means the lethality of the thing that it got deployed against is up here, and we’re talking like street destroying heavy ordnance that will suck the oxygen out of the immediate AOE and immediately kill you. So, you know, OK, we’re gonna go near this fight, but we’re not going into that fight. And if we do go into that fight, everybody’s fucking dead—like you and your friends are toast.”

Image1of3(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

Image1of3

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

Concept art

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

Concept art

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

The different scales of players and enemies

If we can get the player to survey an area, take a moment, and not immediately shoot at everything that they see, that’s a W for us.Miles Williams, Fun Dog Studios CEO

If we can get the player to survey an area, take a moment, and not immediately shoot at everything that they see, that’s a W for us.

“If we can get the player to survey an area, take a moment, and not immediately shoot at everything that they see, that’s a W for us,” says Williams. Scouting and doing threat assessments is going to be paramount. You’ll want to pick routes with lots of cover, rather than rushing into “that open stretch of no man’s land with a bunch of crosses and dead robots in it”. Each run educates you, teaching you what sounds different enemies make, how they behave, if you can outrun them or if they’ll immediately outpace you, grab you and gobble you up.

Holster it

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

A player character with a gas mask

Williams admits that it might be tough to teach players not to use their weapons at the drop of a hat. Decades of gaming has taught us that, if we see an enemy and we have a gun, we put as many bullets in it as we can. But here, your guns are defensive countermeasures—you’re using them to protect yourself and your team when you don’t have any other options.

On the subject of your team, Fun Dog isn’t quite ready to reveal how each character works, but Williams does confirm that you’ll be picking from a cast of survivors that each have their own playstyle and skill trees. When you die in a mission you lose all your loot, but you still get XP, giving you constant progression—but that progression doesn’t equate to becoming more and more powerful. The stuff you unlock gives you more options, more utility, giving you a sense of growth without diluting the theme of being a nobody in a war that’s so much bigger than you.

Then there’s the world progression. The factions will react not just to what you’re doing in that immediate mission, but what you’ve been doing in previous ones. So if you do something that really messes up one faction’s plans, you might find they’ve deployed some units to hunt you down to get revenge, or sectors will become more dangerous as factions lock it down.

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

The player watching bombers dropping their payloads

“Because we hit the supply chain, this boss got killed,” Williams offers as an example. “Now that other army controls that sector completely. And on paper, it’s like, well, you got batteries, or you got whatever you wanted from that particular unit, and your people are OK, but now you’re fucked if you go to that sector.”

Similarly, your actions are going to have an impact on the rest of the survivors—the people you’re trying to help. If you did something that got thousands of people killed, vendors back home might be understandably a bit upset, jacking up their prices as a result. So even if you survive and grab lots of loot, there might be some unpleasant consequences. Life in a warzone, it turns out, kinda sucks.

It’s exciting stuff, and this persistency is something Fun Dog wants to expand on post-launch as well, but Williams is also wary of over-promising. It’s easy to forget, given the flashiness of the trailers and the ambitious nature of the team’s plans, that this is still a small developer. “We’re trying not to promise something that we can’t deliver at our team size,” he says. “So I’m very much leaning into like, yeah, we think this is cool. And yes, we want to expand on it over time as we build out the world. But it’s also kept in a way that makes sense to the player. So we keep it simple versus it being the macro promise of, like, every drop of water that you drink from your canteen will change the map next time.”

War is Hell

(Image credit: Fun Dog Studios)

A player facing down a huge mech

That’s what The Forever Winter is offering, too, but obviously with a greater emphasis on stealth and tactics. You’re getting one of your team to hang back and provide cover, huddled behind a burned out vehicle with their grenade launcher at the ready; another to search the area for loot, hoping they don’t find a hostile machine instead; and another ready to create a loud distraction so the rest of you can flee if a mech appears, so at least some of you survive—like a horror-themed Ghost Recon. And that is very much something I want in my life.

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Bigger fish#

Holster it#

War is Hell#

Bigger fish

Holster it

War is Hell