Recenzje The Forever Winter

Very interesting premise and setting with a lot of potential. In essence, it's a mixture of an extraction shooter with a focus on stealth and emergent gameplay. At least that was the idea. In its current state, The Forever Winter is a frustrating mess, due to undercooked mechanics, bugs, and questionable design decisions. For each element that is good, there is something that simply doesn't work. - Players progress via base resource management (water + money), which you will lose if you don't play for too long. Devs literally punish you for not playing, excusing it as "realism." It got a little lenient in recent updates, but it's still a dark design pattern, no matter how you disguise it. - Spectacular AI faction battles that result differently each time due to what type of enemies are fighting ... if the enemy AI weren't dumb as a rock. Infantry units will stand still shooting when they encounter a large mech they cannot destroy. The said mech may try to shoot them but cannot lower the cannon as much and will never hit. And tanks will drive into other vehicles and end up being launched into the air due to collisions reacting wildly. - Cool enemy faction designs and "weight" classes: we have multiple infantry classes, tanks, small to large mechs, helicopters, and so on ... and that includes invincible enemies and can insta-kill you with a force grab from up to 80 ft. And some enemies literally spawn and chase you because you picked up water. - Fun gunplay from player POV ... in which engaging 90% of the time kills your run, because enemies respawn endlessly around you and shooting alerts them immediately. Bonus points when enemy AI attacks first for no reason. Extra bonus points when encountering invincible enemies mentioned above. - Stealth-oriented gameplay ... in which enemy AI did not get the memo to act like in a stealth game. Once AI gets suspicious of you (no aggro yet), they do not return to their patrol area but constantly follow you. And once they aggro, you can't escape enemies at all, unless they despawn or die. Until that happens, armed units will keep sniping you no matter the distance. Melee units will surround you because they run 2x faster than you to compensate for the fact that they cannot jump the smallest obstacles and deal damage before their animation trigger. - Really cool atmosphere and artistically pleasing maps with unique landmarks and beautiful vistas ... and a whole ton of narrow pathways on which you will be sandwiched between enemy patrols with no way to avoid fighting them. Plus, some maps have very unintuitive layouts, and it's very easy to get stuck on some geometry. - Missions with interesting designs and unique objectives, like finding a way into and looting a specific area, rescuing civilians, helping mech pilot escape, defeating mini-bosses, completing a run undetected, and so on ... would be fun if objectives would actually spawn on the map and RNG wouldn't randomly kill your run. This is especially true when you need to find and bring back specific items—you may play the map over and over again, but the required enemy/loot just won't appear. - Playable characters have different strengths and weaknesses ... which means nothing since they all basically play the same. Except for Bag Man, because he just runs slow. - 2D art is consistent ... but looks AI-generated, especially portraits for playable characters and vendors. Heck, those in character select screen don't even match in-game models. - Fun in coop ... only if you and your friends are drunk. There is hope yet, since all issues I've outlined are fixable, but currently it's hard for me to honestly recommend the game.