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Review: Generation Zero (Steam)

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Welcome to 1980’s Sweden. The local population has disappeared, and hostile machines roam the streets. Explore the open world to unravel the mystery, perfect your fighting strategies, and prepare to strike back. Play alone or together with up to three friends, as you discover ways to defeat the invaders.

Pros:

  • Cool graphics.
  • 31768mb download size.
  • Controller support.
  • Steam achievements.
  • Drop in/out co-op.
  • Loot-random drops for each player meaning every loot spot is different for each player.
  • Fast travel between safe houses.
  • Survival shooter gameplay.
  • Day/night cycle and weather types including heavy rain that minimizes visibility, crazy good thunderstorms.
  • Map-can set a waypoint, points of interest fill in as you discover them.
  • Each enemy type act and behave differently.
  • The enemy is robots/mechs.
  • Some cool locations.
  • Fast loading.
  • Dense cities/towns with a lot of houses and barns you can go in.
  • Loot cars, car boots, enemy bodies, and chests and boxes.
  • Loot is on a rarity scale and with scopes it increases how well they look (early low-level scopes have cracks), guns increase in damage.
  • Drag and drop inventory and with a controller, you can use a simple assign to button option.
  • Load out-main gun, secondary and a pistol.
  • Distractions-a huge part of the game is causing distraction and the game uses these well, you can get fireworks and radios to distract and disrupt the enemy.
  • The story is set so you can do it at your leisure.
  • The tutorial is actually the first few hours as you do simple missions and tasks.
  • Play how you want.
  • Open world.
  • Discover side missions.
  • Earn EXP and level up to put points into your abilities like faster reload or more storage etc.
  • You earn EXP from escaping combat, discovery, missions and killing enemies.
  • Very atmospheric with a constant feeling of uneasiness.
  • Enemies sense noise and can hear you through walls, you can also break line of sight with some enemy types.
  • Plays best in Co-op.
  • Revive-can revives teammates but in solo, you can revive yourself or die and respawn at a safe house.
  • Can drop items for teammates.
  • No friendly fire.

Cons:

  • Map progress is host only. The missions stay with you but not the map.
  • Loot respawn when joining/leaving a game.
  • Clothing- is shown as a nod to the 80s and lets you dress how you want, but that’s not true as clothing has stay affecting buffs so it just makes it another stay to keep an eye on.
  • Enemies can shoot through walls and even had them clip through several times.
  • In solo, it can be too challenging with areas of interest swarming with enemies making progress slow if at all.
  • No penalty for dying at all.
  • Controller inputs are slow.
  • Little story guidance, you generally get a vague description of where to go and what to do.
  • Slow unlock pace.
  • Limiting storage space and again due to slow unlock the extra storage is a ways off.
  • Random noises.
  • Enemies can see through walls at an insane length. Had it where I was 3 floors down in a bunker and an enemy on the surface locked on me and spent 10 minutes just shooting at me.
  • Empty world, in between settlements and towns is nothing.
  • Opening things like doors have to be precise as if you have no icon then you get no open.
  • Blurry! The biggest issue for me especially was how blurry and messy it all looked! It’s to do with the depth of field (which you can’t change or turn off) it gave me such a headache and makes the game look really bad.
  • Houses start to all look the same with the same layout/loot placement.

  • 7/10
    Graphics - 7/10
  • 6/10
    Sound - 6/10
  • 7/10
    Accessability - 7/10
  • 5/10
    Length - 5/10
  • 4/10
    Fun Factor - 4/10
5.8/10

Summary

Generation Zero, a game that sounded like it could be a real contender and maybe even reinvent aspects of the open world survival genre. In actuality, the game is slow, empty and full of bugs. The first major enemy in the game is not even an actual game element, oh no its the fucking depth of field! It makes everything blurry and messy. It may take a while and the effects will vary but fuck me it gave me such a bad headache that even now I am still feeling. I left the review for launch day in hopes they would address it as the Steam forums lit up echoing my feelings. But no. For that, I had to limit what I could play and that didn’t help. That said I still really want to like the game, the world looks good and the enemies are a good idea but the lackluster story pacing and progress is messy, playing Co-op whilst fun is not a must do as only the host gets map progress. For that map progress alone, why bother joining random people? You are screwing yourself every session as the missions save and continue but not the map, think about it. Loot is a good idea for the rarity and how that works with cracked scopes and lower damage numbers, but when you get the loot respawning every time you reload it makes the aspect of loot redundant and a second thought. I constantly had to drop ammo, constantly getting duplicate guns and items. It’s just a loot sim with no rewarding features. I just don’t understand what is going on, they put so much into building an atmosphere of fear and Mech fights but it near enough instantly turns into a broken mess and not a very enjoyable one. Granted they could patch and add stuff to improve it but fuck that. You buy a game to play the game not buy the game to shelve it and hope they finish it. Generation Zero is a game that feels unfinished and needs graphics options to stop giving players actual headaches.

Jim Smale

Gaming since the Atari 2600, I enjoy the weirdness in games counting Densha De Go and RC De Go as my favourite titles of all time. I prefer gaming of old where buying games from a shop was a thing, Being social in person was a thing. Join me as I attempt to adapt to this new digital age!