If you love Arc Raiders, you really need to try my favourite extraction shooter: The Forever Winter

It’s rare that I vibe with an extraction shooter, and really I’ve only properly fallen for one: The Forever Winter, which has been modestly successful but still seems to fly under a lot of radars. It launched in early access a year ago, but it’s been on my mind again thanks to Arc Raiders, the current new hotness.

Before Arc Raiders’ explosive launch, our reviewer, Elie, was telling me why they were digging it so much, and it became clear that it coincidentally shared a lot with what I remain convinced is the genre’s high point. And I suspect that if you’re having a blast with Arc Raiders at the moment, then you’ll also have a great time with The Forever Winter.

Murder machines

To be clear, though, there are sizable differences, but that’s also why I’m recommending it. If you’re already playing Arc Raiders, there wouldn’t be much point in me directing you towards something that’s essentially identical.

For one, The Forever Winter is not a PvP deal. It’s pure co-op PvE, with humans facing off against brutal AI enemies split into warring factions. But it’s clear that for a significant portion of Arc Raiders players, PvP isn’t part of the appeal—particularly those who have mostly been indulging in the solo side of things.

The Forever Winter loses no tension despite the lack of human opponents, though. Like Arc Raiders, this is a world that has been overrun with robots, with desperate human survivors now living underground, sending poor souls topside to scavenge for resources and water. But where Arc Raiders goes for bright colours and fun costumes, The Forever Winter instead channels the post-Judgement Day era of the Terminator universe.

We’re talking full nightmare fuel: skeletal cyborgs ruthlessly hunting down humans; monstrous machines literally devouring their victims, snatching them up and swallowing them; building sized mechs stomping through battlefields made up of broken bones and machine parts. It takes a lot of cues from survival horror, and you’ll end most of your runs covered in sweat.

The Forever Winter supports solo play, and that’s when it feels overtly like a survival horror romp. You’re not really meant to fight the machines. What can one person do against world-spanning armies controlled by AI overlords? Instead you’re expected to shoot only when there’s no other option, and the rest of the time you’ll want to sneak through Hell, scrounging for scrap before you make a hasty escape.

This is true of co-op as well, to be fair, but through coordination your chance of survival greatly increases, and if you’re downed your allies can rescue you. And as you get your hands on better equipment, and start to learn the maps and enemy weak points, you’ll start to gain the confidence for more aggressive plays, working together to tackle some of the more terrifying machine nightmares.

Hell is other people

If you like the uncertainty that comes from teaming up with potential rivals in Arc Raiders, you also might enjoy the possibility of betrayal in The Forever Winter. There’s friendly fire, you see, so there’s always going to be that niggling doubt in the back of your mind: “Can I trust this rando?” The good news is that the game has systems in place to make betrayal risky, specifically in the form of your reputation with survivors. Thus, you won’t be getting betrayed very often, but there’s always a chance you’ve teamed up with a wrong ‘un.

One significant difference, and the thing that I think makes The Forever Winter so much more fascinating than Arc Raiders, is the role of the AI. In Arc Raiders, the Arcs are simply killers. Their sole reason for existing is to kill players, which they do very well, or to be killed by players.

The Forever Winter’s machine menace doesn’t really care about you. See, the world has been destroyed by these opposing armies, which continue to fight over resources. You are largely beneath their notice. You’re just a dirty human rooting around for junk. Don’t get me wrong: if they see you, they’ll try to kill you. But unless you start doing things that interfere with their missions, they won’t be looking for you.

It’s one of the most exciting things about The Forever Winter: that there is this huge war playing out all around you. Cyborgs and tanks and mechs mercilessly dismantling each other as you rifle through human detritus and try to get home with a nice haul. I’ve often found myself cowering in a muddy hole as the war rages above me, waiting for my chance to loot some corpses and scarper.

So you’re simply a tiny part of this massive, horrifying eco system. And when I mentioned AI missions before, I wasn’t talking about a bit of flavour: the AI has specific objectives that frequently have nothing to do with you, but which you can get in the middle of, disrupting their missions while putting a big target on your back.

There really isn’t another extraction shooter that’s so rich in atmosphere and tension, which is further elevated by what’s genuinely some of the strongest post-apocalyptic art design that you’ll have ever seen. It’s straight up stunning, almost beautiful, even as it forces you to stare at a world that has been engulfed by atrocities.

But it’s also a bit rough at times, lacking the polish and optimisation that you might be used to in Arc Raiders. It’s an incredibly ambitious, elaborate early access game, and with that sometimes comes unwelcome friction. But there’s just so much that makes putting up with any issues worth it.

The horrifying enemies, the base invasions, the distinct characters that serve as the game’s classes, the sadistic difficulty—I love it. And it’s been fascinating watching it develop, as the devs introduce new systems and adapt to player feedback.

These updates are often surprisingly transformative, though not always heartily welcomed by players that have gotten used to how things normally work, like the new tunnel system, which sees players spending more time underground. The idea is that you must traverse shifting tunnels to get to the game’s war-torn regions, but by using expensive drones you can skip some of this—essentially using a fast travel system.

It’s not the sort of game you should expect to get to grips with easily, and if the appeal of Arc Raiders is, for you, its more casual nature, then The Forever Winter might be a touch too stressful. But if you don’t mind feeling perpetually terrified, if the idea of losing everything in a dark, miserable pit tickles your fancy, then you really should give this a shot.