If you love the crumbling, gothic sci-fi megacity and grimdark vibes of Warhammer 40k Darktide, or you’re a fan of the Warhammer 40k tabletop game and lore, you owe it to yourself to check out The Forever Winter. The upcoming “four-player tactical survival horror shooter” casts players as lowly scavengers hunting for supplies in a future where “massive armies are skinning the bones of our once beautiful earth”.
If we didn’t know the cinematic trailer – which you can watch below – was advertising a game, we would have mistaken it for an incredibly high grade Warhammer 40k animation project. This must be what 40k battlefields feel like for everyone except the Space Marines – unfathomable, unending horror.
The Forever War is a four-player sci-fi shooter with skills and gear, but that’s where similarities with Warhammer 40k Darktide end. Decades of relentless war have turned the earth into a living hell. Your group of scavengers must venture into the ruins of the macro-city of Lost Angels to hunt for supplies, gear, and weapons, taking on contracts for the two warring factions in the hopes of keeping your survivor settlement intact a little longer.
The military super weapons active in the conflict utterly dwarf your all-too-human characters. According to a gameplay trailer, you’ll be “outgunned, undersupplied, and constantly under attack”, and “must rely on cooperation and cunning to survive even minor enemy contact”. Meanwhile, “automated underground factories churn out war machines by the minute”.
And even as the war is destroying the city by day, “AI driven machines nicknamed ‘The Night Shift’ rebuild by night”. “Recovery Units” stalk the street to drag away the dead “to be harvested for their organs”. As a 40k lore buff, this gives me shivers, and the sudden desire to build a custom traitor Mechanicus Warhammer 40k faction themed around those Recovery Units.
More gameplay systems have been revealed in a more recent trailer, below. Your characters will accept jobs from the two warring factions which send you into the city with missions ranging from sabotage to assassination. Completing jobs gets you more jobs, which we have to assume brings you more and better gear. But the more control a faction gains over a sector of the city, “the more heavy units they will deploy, and the more dangerous it becomes”.
If you somehow find something truly valuable, you’ll have to face down a boss, which the trailer promises will be more than a match for a fully geared up fireteam.
You’re wearing a customisable “rig”, that can offer you features like deployable turrets or a pneumatic jump. In another game you’d expect that kind of tool to eventually get upgraded with armor and bigger features until you’re practically wearing Space Marine power armor, but in Forever Winter it’s a crapsack of bodged together components that looks more like Norman Reedus’ portable parcel shelf from Death Stranding.
Your home base also isn’t secure. The trailer briefly reveals that if you run out of water, your scavengers will die, losing all XP and skills – we hope this isn’t tied into any predatory monetisation systems or aggressive daily-play elements in a battlepass.
If your settlement is thriving you’ll attract traders and mercenaries who will “have your six” in combat – they sound like the NPCs from Far Cry 2 or the Mysterious Stranger from Fallout, characters who appear to get your fat out of the fire.
Despite the limitations of Darktide, it remains one of the best Warhammer 40k games on PC, and with the Space Marine 2 release date coming in September our gaming time is already heavily stitched up this year – but we’re still very, very excited for The Forever Winter. A closed beta is coming at some unannounced point, and we’re hoping to get on board.
If you dig its aesthetic, you absolutely must check out the Inq28 model-making scene. It’s an offshoot of Warhammer 40k fandom that continuously produces excellent grimdark miniatures and indie games, whether that’s a deeply disturbing model for a Necron a star god, or a miniature games that’s equal parts Warhammer and Dark Souls.
Source: Wargamer
