The Forever Winter is upon us, and the gritty extraction “shooter” is already making the rounds. However, the game has been met with a ton of criticism from players despite its many positives, with critics mostly citing tech problems and the strange, unnecessary water mechanic.
The technical problems were to be expected. Developed by a small team and released way early through the Steam early access system, the title was bound to suffer from technical and performance issues. Janky movement, clipping, and other related bugs are sort of part of the early access package, no matter what game you’re getting (there have been notable exceptions to the rule, but it’s still a rule). The primary problem, however, has nothing to do with your bog standard early access jank. No, this time it’s a real-time water mechanic that requires you to constantly bring water from runs to your base, or else it will tick down even when offline, wipe your progress, and return you to first base.
This means that if you log off for a few days, or even hours, without bringing in enough water to keep everything set, you’re at risk of losing all of your hard-earned progress and gear. And I mean HARD earned, as The Forever Winter is a severely difficult game where runs are never certain, and obtaining any loot is a gamble of its own. As one negative Steam review points out, this mechanic turns what’s supposed to be a fun albeit challenging extraction shooter experience into a “chore no matter what gets fixed, what gets better.”
On the flip side, the developers did allow players to share water between each other and donate stuff to others, making water less of an unobtainable resource that you just cannot get your hands on. Even so, it’s quite annoying to the many people leaving negative Steam reviews for the game, and we’ll see what solution the devs will come up with.
The Forever Winter launched on Sept. 24 and is currently sitting at 65 percent positive Steam reviews, placing it firmly in the top half of the “Mixed” review category.
