Generation Zero

Very lukewarm "recommend".
The game has a decent opening and a very interesting setting / scenario. Early on, there is a story to follow.
...however, past the first few hours (out of the tutorial area) the story just kind of stops. it's open world, meaning you're doing the same things over and over again. The quests are simple: go into yet another bunker (all typically smaller than the one in the opening section), turn on the power, get main missions. the main missions are just going to X location, killing more enemies you've already been killing hundreds of, for the reward of a text blurb or a brief, not exactly revealing voiced message. A lot of houses etc. are copypasted, with there being a lack of story or NPC's each location just ends up " a place to loot", and most loot is randomly generated and becomes completely forgettable.
Side activities like base attack / defense are just plain unfun and barely functional; the attacks involve infinitely, fast respawning hordes of enemies while you're supposed to try and actually break the base and you get zero cover.
Essentially, there's story content for a 5-10 hour game but i played 36 hours and didn't get to the end, i just got finally got bored and opted to stop playing. The game has a lot potential that's untapped, the developers apparently preferred to just make new (stronger) weapons to sell as pricy DLC.
That said... i paid very little for in deep steam sale and the first few hours were really good. As such, if you can get it cheap, play it for a bit but don't bother deep diving into the open world / long term game because there's really just not much there.

It's basically the Hunter Call of the Wild with robot deers.
This is the prequel to Horizon Zero Dawn.
My wife’s boyfriend calls it a Swedish version of Red Dawn but with Robots while having the gameplay depth of No Man's Sky when that was released. Still… I love it.
tldr: You shoot robots while wandering around a very pretty world. It's updated a lot, and has lots to do. You can go f*ck it and start robot WW3 where they just keep coming, or take out a big guy and run off to blow up more stuff.
I absolutely love this game! One of my favorites. The setting/atmosphere of the game is so well done. It feels super eerie, tense, and isolated. Easily one of the best atmospheres in any game! The game is criminally underrated.
Generation Zero is a great game, and I actually just play it solo for the most part. It does a great job of making the huge map feel so eerie because EVERYONE has basically vanished, and there are these strange robotic creatures roaming around and they are dangerous as hell. It can be a tough game as the robots are powerful, but you slowly start building up your arsenal with better and stronger weapons to even the playing field a bit.
Sort of similar to some other highly tactical collect-and-fight games. Tactics is everything, and it drives a stealthy kind of approach, even if blazing guns works well at times, especially during Co-Op, which is strongly recommended! It’s great fun, worth the money, and you will be amazed by the Scandinavian landscape which is very true to the actual feeling of being in Sweden during early autumn.
The loneliness, the environmental storytelling attendant with going through people's empty homes, the tension of being spotted, the thrill of bringing down the big boys, and the uncanny valley-ness of the culture (I'm American) all combines to form a singular experience. If it were fraught with people, puzzles, and a bunch of meaningless mini-games, Gen Zero would be a very different beast; to me, a lesser one.
It's been mislabeled though. This is NOT a survival game in any shape or form.
There's no hunger/temperature meters that you have to worry about. Instead the name of the game is guerilla warfare against an occupying force of killer robots. When you first get introduced to them, you'll probably find that it's pretty easy to kill one of them when they're by themselves (after learning their behaviors and where to shoot). Thing is that these things tend to travel in groups, often different types of robots that behave in different but aggressive ways.
So we basically have a perfect premise for a sandbox Terminator game. The stealth is simultaneously very forgiving and very brutal, in that enemies seem to have poor eyesight (you can basically lay down in tall grass and become invisible) but are relentless once alerted (some of them will chase you for many kilos before losing track of you). The gunplay is really smooth and satisfying (excellent models/sound as well) and even features multiple ammunition types for each gun, and some attachments. Ammunition is generally pretty rare so you have to make your shots count (which means not aiming at armored parts when possible, or breaking them off with the right ammo).
Ammunition has weight, as does everything you carry, but that's about as hardcore as it gets as far as military simulation is concerned. The game doesn't keep track of individual magazines and their ammo count, like STALKER or Escape from Tarkov. It's a lot more laid back than that, and honestly it works. The consequences for dying are basically just travel time/distance since you don't drop any of your stuff.
Also despite being a sandbox style looter shooter, this game actually does have a story and missions that you play through. It's a light touch, you're absolutely free to explore and tackle areas at your leisure, but it really added a lot more structure than I'm used to in these kinds of games. It's all text, recordings, and environmental storytelling, which helps add to the largely atmospheric tone of the game.
Something to keep in mind if you are not a fan of long matches, then you'd probably hate this game. Encounters with higher tier enemies can take up to an hour or more just in one fight, especially if more enemies keep showing up. It's chaotic as hell, with explosions and bullets flying everywhere to the point even I can barely tell what's shooting at me or not. It's definitely a game where if you aren't prepared to fight, you'd better be prepared to die. It's still a lot of fun to find new weapons and armor, as well as cosmetics. But I mostly grind missions, rivals, and just try to focus on the main story as well.
I have mostly played it by myself, but again it is mostly a co-op focused multiplayer game. Besides the times I’ve played with my wife’s boyfriend, I can mostly speak for the singleplayer experience, but I honestly love this game. I can throw on a podcast and sneaky kill some robo dogs. There's a lot of room for stealth game veterans to flex their skills. I play on the hardest difficulty, and despite describing the stealth as forgiving earlier I can safely say that the enemies are sufficiently oppressive once you get going.
In conclusion, it’s great. It’s atmospheric, worth it, especially on sale. Better with friends but I have played it through solo and just done it my way and it’s still great. Sound design is great and weapon models and handling are really nice. Lots of sci-fi elements. Absolutely worth it.
9/10

Definitely a unique take on the FPS genre, with an awful lot of features that should really be a standard (Ex. Sprinting whilst reloading, increased movement speed even with depleted stamina)
Overall an absolutely fabulous game with a lot of replay value and excellent multiplayer.
One notable problem is the draw distance, which is not a controllable setting in any menu, and seems to be entirely dependant on machine spec, but with no common features. Even high end PC's may only have 250m of draw distance before the machines pop-out, where a good laptop might have 4-500m. It's entirely random and makes 2 challenges unobtainable, and has persisted through the last 4 updates at least with no fix in sight, so do be mindful of this.
Solid 9/10
A WORD OF WARNING
If you value your save data on PC and in the Cloud, Do Not, under any circumstances, play this game on a steam deck. It fails to acquire the cloud save, doesn't warn you about it, launches anyway, and overwrites your save file with the blank one you've just started playing. It's not unique to GZ, there's a myriad of games with the same problem, but this is the first one I've encountered, so I feel it the decent thing to do to warn you, fine traveller of the reviews section.
Take it from someone who had 205 hours or progress stolen from him irrevocably. Make a backup of your save file.

I figure that as my time coming this game in any significant way is probably coming to an end, it's probably a good time to throw it a review. For what I achieved - playing through the main campaign, the DLC, lightly dabbling in the endgame, and a HELL of a lot of exploration and side quests - 110 hours all up is pretty good.
Firstly, how do you describe this game? It's an open-world FPS similar to ones you may have played in the past, but goes for a fairly unique combination of existing mechanics & tropes. I personally feel like it lifts elements and touchpoints from series like Far Cry, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or Dead Island pretty well.
You're presented with the vast Scandinavian landscapes of rural Swedish archipelagos to explore, where you loot for survival resources and weapons. All the meanwhile, being mercilessly stalked by a ruthless robot army hivemind whilst trying to find survivors and discover the origin of the machines.
The game is fairly oppressive with its difficulty to start - resources are scarce and your weaponry limited, so your foes are truly pretty terrifying. You're often sneaking around trying to avoid putting yourself in sticky situations (or having to tackle them tactfully when you do inevitably get dragged into combat with a horde of killer robots).
As your arsenal expands, the game also ramps up the difficulty by introducing more and more intimidating robots to face, but it does feel as though you wind up accruing enough power and knowledge to start turning the tides in your favour. You'll especially see this if you come across an endgame player in co-op - they're often running circles around the biggest of foes, unloading all sorts of devastating munitions into them and just generally trivialising the content.
If I'd wanted to sink my teeth into the endgame, or clear the entire (utterly enormous) map from corner to corner, then I could have probably sunk many more hours into the game. But honestly, I just didn't have the drive. With the regular updates being dropped by the live-ops dev team, it sort of has a faux-live-service feeling to it. Especially when the endgame is just a huge RNG grind for the best weapons so you can... keep grinding I guess?
It's certainly not bad in that respect, but I just don't have the patience for too many of those types of gaming experiences - especially with the inconsistency resulting from a dwindling playerbase. And for the largely singleplayer experience I DID have, consisting of primarily of campaign & exploration, I honestly did have a good time with Generation Zero. A little buggy and jank, but consistently engaging and tense.
★★★★✰

very good game especially when you just start the game and barely have ammo and have the worst guns and you look behind and see a 100,000 pound block of tungsten running at you faster than a sports car getting ready to kick you in the fucking jaw

If you want a deep story and complex gameplay this is not that. If you just want to relax and kick it wondering a scenic map looking for giant robots to get into fights with this is your game. In this modern day age where every game is so busy it feels like playing it is a chore, this one actually makes me feel like I'm playing a game.

Conceptually fun, though I struggle to play through this in singleplayer. The world is vast and there is a lot to see and plenty to fight - and your first entry into the world with your first character will be with heavy story until you are effectively let loose, but the loop feels as if it wasn't really meant for soloists. It's doable, but I've had more than a few problems with massive enemies or elites enemies that don't die with any speed even with the unquestionably stronger DLC weapons and deployables handy. The grind to become a jack of all trades to survive the area isn't appealing - though unquestionably you can and will have fun with a +1 to cover your weaknesses as you begin specializing skills and gear.