Generation Zero is this open world, co op campaign looter shooter game that I've had my eye on for a few years now, but kind of avoided because the only enemy in the game are robots, and I never really liked fighting robots in video games. Something about just shooting at plates of metal all day never felt satisfying so I always thought they were the least fun enemy type. Of course the main reason I picked it up (for cheap) was the co-op aspect, which I completed the game with.
The game starts where you've crash landed onto this remote Scandinavian island, a typical open world game where you must look at your big game map and select a main mission and traverse the environments to get there. Though, the first impression is good because the game uses the Avalanche engine which is rarely used, but it provides some incredible lighting and visuals that other engines rarely show off. Just things like how the light reflects off the ground, the moon shimmering through the trees, the way snow and rain falls across the screen, the depth of field in distance and the whole dynamic graphical presentation is just stunning. The sound design, is also one of the biggest highlights of the game, which is something I rarely notice or even touch on, but the sound design here is very well done. The guns in particular actually sound like guns in the contrast between the ambient sound of the environment and then the huge blasts of the guns really make it come across like you're firing a weapon, even if you turn the game sound down it still comes across like these things are almost deafening to fire, like in real life. So you have these long instances of just running, listening to the quiet ambience, then a gun blast goes off from your co-op partner and it is actually startling because of how almost realistic it sounds. Though, the game incorporates these synthwave techno type music tracks that just feel out of place and awkward with the rest of the whole sort of desolate STALKER type vibe the game is aiming at.
So the overall presentation of the game is very well done visually and sound wise. The presentation at first is also immersive because of the sort of desolate island you're placed on, its got all sorts of village houses that are seemingly hand crafted and manually curated, so its interesting to just go inside buildings and see the interior decorating of the places, how people lived, the attention to detail is pretty high. So The first 2 hours or so seem really promising, you quickly come across your first few enemies and these things are all sorts of variety of robots, first its like these animal type dog robots that prance around the fields sprinting away from you or at you, but eventually you come across all sorts of types of robots from flying UFO type things, to these gigantic spider mechs that are absolute bullet sponges that literally take like 10 mins of constant shooting to kill, to other more two legged soldier type bots. At first I wasnt quite sure if I really liked the whole robot vibe, but as the time in the game grew I still never really got into it... yeah, when you shoot the robots they make a huge spark and explosion bursts showing you hit them (theres no hitmarkers) ... but still, it was never quite clear if shooting them in the head or anywhere has any impact on the amount of damage, and shooting at brainless husks of metal still feels like youre just shooting at the side of a shack sort of.
So the game has all sorts of the standard looter shooter open world mechanics, you've got your skill trees with basic stuff like run speed, crafting type stuff, marginal upgrades to amount of health and damage you recieve. Nothing amazing here. Then you've got this 'profile' tab were you can equip different clothing, seemingly offering armor bonuses, but throughout my entire playthrough I never really found any armor that offers any notable bonuses, just random pieces of clothing and aesthetic things, so this entire feature seemed pointless on my playthrough.
The loot is just alright, its got the kind of Ubisoft colored loot like Grey is worst, Green is ok, Blue is great, Purple awesome, Yellow best etc...you can go around opening containers, crates, enemies, random dead humans on the ground like military soldiers or encampments. You pick up a lot of crafting stuff like Lead, plastics, linins, cloth which you can use at the fast travel bases to craft things like med kits and ammo, something I rarely felt necessary. The unfortunate thing about the looting is theres nothing much in the way of interesting armor or clothing, yes you can randomly find clothing but its almost always just aesthetic, the cloting and armor pieces seem to have no actual colored grade like the weapons did. But the best thing about the loot is the high variety of weapons you can find, theres all sorts of different guns, Magnums, lots of handguns, lots of assault rifles, rocket launchers, multiple shotguns, snipers, hunting rifles etc. You can get attachments to put on them too, the best one is Silencer which really feels useful in this game because the guns are actually so loud like they would be in real life you actually want to put a suppressor on them to make it more bearable during gunfights on your hearing, its immersive like that. But other than the thrill of finding a new higher colored tier weapon of the same gun you have, theres not much more exciting about the loot, and instead its constantly annoying having to accidentally not pickup useless crap like grenades, radios, mines, random objects, explosives etc to weigh yourself down. By default you can only carry 62lb of weight and its really easy to become overencombered, making yourself fumble with menus to get back to being able to sprint.
Speaking of sprint, its strangely designed here. You have a sprint meter which is incredibly short, even when fully upgraded, which lasts about only 1 second. After its depleted, you can still sprint, only slightly slower. This system just felt weird and stupid and pointless like I'm not going to wait for the tiny meter to replenish just to sprint 20% faster. Made me wonder if all my points into sprint upgrades were pointless and a waste.
There are seemingly two vehicles in the game by default, a bicycle and later on a motorbike which you must add gas to and repair with kits if damaged. The problem, though, is the games map is very vertical and lots of mountains so more often that not its faster to just sprint everywhere because you can run up hills and mountains whereas the bikes struggle.
Now I get to the actual part where the game falls flat and made me have a bad time.
The entire loop of the game consists of, as per usual with a lot of bad open world games, picking a mission and spending the bulk of the gameplay simply travelling across the map just to start the mission. Now, once you finally arrive at the mission (sometimes after 10 mins of doing nothing but sprinting across the map) You do one or two things like pickup an object, destroy some object, kill a few enemies, then the mission is complete and you do it all over again.
It's bad and just boring.
I would say 75% of my playtime is doing nothing but holding sprint and running across the map to the next mission or staring at the map trying to figure out what fast travel places to go to which are closest.
It gets even worse when I realized that the game only drip feeds you 2 or 3 missions at a time, then you have to "Find a warboard" which means you need to find some underground bunker and find an objectives board inside it in order to get 2 or 3 new missions. So everytime you run out of missions, you have nothing to do but run around the map randomly until it tells you the location of the bunker to get more missions, or it even confusingly wastes your time by saying "Kill machines in X region and pickup 3 keycards to progress" - but it doesnt actually work and they dont actually drop keycards until you first find the bunker, so it just completely wastes your fucking time if you try to follow the objective. We once sat there shooting enemies for 40 minutes in some nonstop endless wave respawning event trying to find the keycards but none of them were dropping only to realize it doesnt work unless you do it around the bunker location, it just lies to you.
Other instances where the game just sucks and annoying is if you bother to fight enemies in the open world, it seems like they barely stop spawning and instead its like if you bother to try to shoot 3 enemies, it becomes this gigantic nonstop swarm of huge monster robots and respawning guys for like 20 minutes its just stupid. It also says weird shit like "Won combat" or "escaped combat" whenever you i guess 'successfully' complete a encounter? its just janky.
The map system and UI has problems too, in co-op for whatever reason, frequently only one person can see certain vital objects on the map such as fast travel points, main mission points etc. If one person selects a mission, it doesnt select it for the other person. It will randomly untrack the mission youve selected too and replace it with another one. It has a compass on top showing you missions, but its not useful because you cant select what appears on it. When you select a mission, it doesnt show you any indication on screen where it is. The best thing to do is manually place a waypoint on the map, which thankfully the co-op partner can see, and then just coordinating to run to that waypoint.
The game has all sorts of features its almost like a jack of all trades master of none. It has stalker vibes, but without the interesting mystique, the story is just boring chatter in your ear the whole time on a walkie talkie with like 2-3 voice actors max that sound like theyre lazily rading off a paper in Swedish accent, almsot like its just the programmers themselves being the voice actors. Its just something generic like you arrive on a deserted island full of killer robots but theres a few random Swedish people you can help to overcome them or something.
The game has these bunker segments where you gotta turn the power back on and capture the bunker, sometimes theres these gas covered rooms where you have to equip a gas mask on, the lighting in the bunkers is awesome and if you turn your flashlight off it gets pitch black so it has good atmosphere, but it just feels like a wasted opportunity because the enemies are just kind of lame little spider drones it has no real horror elements or anything really it just feels like a waste of a setting and engine use. It could have done so much more, the technology is there, just the setting and execution falls flat.
So after we spent hours just sprinting across the map for a dozen minutes, finally arriving at a mission location, spending 2-3 minutes tops doing some forgettable objective, then repeating the whole process, we suddenly came across what seemed like another mundane mission "Behind the curtain", barely thinking about it we just did it, ran into some lab with a guy mumbling about some techno bullshit then all of a sudden the whole screen started shaking that just looked like a bad graphics glitch then out of nowhere End Credits. What? The game didnt seem nowhere near the end, We hadnt discovered all the main missions and warboards? I still have main missions left? Why is it giving me end credits? I was completely baffled by this shit. Apparently we accidentally ran to the end mission despite being at mission 28/43 and unlocked the end credits. Well, okay. I'm fine with just ending the game here. It's fucking stupid. I'm sick of spending 15 minutes sprinting across the map just to do a 2 minute long objective that sucked ass anyway. The open world sucks, the enemies suck, they never stop respawning so fighting them feels pointless, by this point I already had multiple purple and yellow guns. The game probably has all sorts of other shit and end game post-campaign crap like all these other kind of modern open world games do, but I've had enough. The only things the game has going for it is the cool deserted Scandinavian island, the amazing Avalanche engine technology, the weapons actually are really fun to use and feel great and the sound design is awesome, but basically everything else is either meh or just designed like shit.
5/10
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