My favourite extraction shooter, The Forever Winter, adds a playable character with a functional gun for a head, tackles its most divisive mechanic and introduces its biggest region yet

pcgamer.com:

The Forever Winter is one of the few extraction shooters I've clicked with—a post-apocalyptic warzone where you play as insignificant scavengers scurrying across desolate battlefields, trying to find loot while soldiers, cyborgs and building-sized machines duke it out all around you. It's tough, intense, and keeps on impressing me with its exceptional art design and oppressive atmosphere.

It's also a bit rough, as early access games often are, but today's huge December update looks set to address its biggest issues and expand it considerably, bringing with it a brand new playable character, significant changes to the controversial water system, the largest region so far, in-game VOIP and performance improvements.

When The Forever Winter launched in September, one of the most common criticisms was the harshness of the water system. Water keeps your base (the Innards) running and the survivors you're scavenging for alive, and the more water you have, the more features you unlock—in particular shops where you can pick up new gear and sell junk you don't need.

But water depletes in real-time. If you bring one canister of water back from a mission, that gives you one extra day of water. As you run low, you lose access to parts of your base, and once you run out entirely you lose everything apart from character progression—specifically your character upgrades and prestige levels. You get one chance to survive—a feature introduced in an earlier patch—if you can fight off a base invasion, but if you die during the assault you lose all your cash and gear, and the Innards is reset.

Water 2.0 introduces some changes to take the strain off you, but in typical The Forever Winter fashion also throws some wrinkles into the mix, to make sure you never forget that this post-apocalyptic future is a terrible place.

Now you can hire water-bots to automatically scrounge around for water and bring it back to the Innards. This happens in real-time, even when you're not playing. So if