Generation Zero

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.

Okay listen im going to cut the fat out of most reviews. I love the game but also am extremely let down. The havent added much to the end game or even really mid game as far as content. No new robot archetypes no reworking base building no new real meat and potatoes.
Which sucks because even with the jank the game is still really fun weak points makes sense and there can be some moments that make you pucker. But then theres the down time.... its rough. Even when you kill you 100th tank or wolf its just kinda meh. This is were i wish they would add more robots or make the AI slowly learn how you play then try and counter play. That alone would be massive. and seeing them work together would be cool. I understand why the hunter is solo but just make more "hunter" variants like one for the wolf or the dogs (make the dogs a pack of like 10 and give them spooky new toys to use)
Its just the obvious shit they dont add is what kills me. Its like Stockholm syndrome with this game. I want to hate it but it just has too much potential to hate it. I has the ability to be a really kick ass game but they keep adding paid dlc and other weird shit. If yall need money add better content and people will buy the game for their friends who will then probably buy DLC. Think long term not this short term
Conclusion if you wanna burn some money for like 20-40 hours of fun with the homies (it will be worth it then) then get burnt out and maybe open it every now and then go for it. you will see the potential of the game its so close yet so far that its painful. I will recommend it because in the beginning it genuinely is a fun game. you will see what i mean later on down the road.
If the game adds new AI or new big stuff id say 8/10. but as of now maybe 6/10. but for those getting it for fun and dont care about endgame content 10/10 (beginning was actually really fun).

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

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

The game may feel empty and hollow, and you may even feel bored and discouraged to continue playing. However the more time you take to stroll around, pay attention to details, try to piece together the information you have while avoiding lore videos that take this away from you as well as just taking in the moments, the sceneries.. it makes you appreciate the beauty of the game properly. Look for items, small stories, collectables while constantly trying to figure out the meaning of everything... definitely makes me recommend this title. Of course, there is more to it, and I encourage you to see for yourself. Even if you encounter bugs at times.

It's a pretty cool game, but supremely buggy, and has some questionable DLC. I played the entire thing in coop and we experienced a lot of bugs, including progression stopping ones. Sometimes restarting the game helps, sometimes it doesn't,
The game is fairly cheap on sales though, but buy at your own risk. Read on to find out why.
The game
It's kinda like Fallout but with robots, and without loading screens when entering interiors.
There's a lot of looting you can do here, even if not a lot of it is meaningful, especially late game, the hoarder type players can get lost in this game.
The environment graphics and detail are very good, but the character models are not, they are quite ugly, and they really didn't bother with the facial animations/lipsync. The interior detail level is kind of a surprise to be honest, because you can enter almost any house, and they are all quite detailed inside, and again, there are no loading screens.
The game mostly runs well, with a few exceptions, at least in COOP, when there are many effects there are FPS drops,
The story/lore could be interesting, but I found it really hard to care about, partially due to all the bugs with quests and NPCs, and partially because the story is presented in completely unstructured, unhinged way.
The BS
And now for the BS - the "create account for daily missions" and "pay to win DLC" BS. Because of course this has to be in the game, its 2020s after all.
The silliest part is that you can accept and complete the daily missions in coop without an account, which means that this requirement for singleplayer is completely arbitrary and useless. It's just evil and greedy. I have no other explanation.
Then there's the DLC. A bunch of game features are separate DLCs (like bikes, and clothes crafting), but I also think that they are already included in the game anyway, so why is there separate DLC listings? Who knows. Then there's the pay to win DLC. A paid-only moped variant with crafting stations & storage. Powerful unique weapons, including things such as aimbot rocket turret that you can deploy anywhere, and paid weapon skins in a paid game.
Base game weapon variety is quite limited.
The bugs
As I said, we experienced many bugs in COOP, for both the client and the host player. The bugginess of this game rivals that of Warframe. I don't know if the same bugginess happens in singleplayer.
Many quests would not progress because enemies that you need to kill simply do not spawn unless you restart the game. This happened in 2023, and it happens in 2024.
None of the DLC main mission progress saved on my save. One DLC side mission permanently bugged for me after we did it in coop, making it incompletable in my save.
Every single location I visited/unlocked as client doesn't save for non host players.
Certain locations do not track completed objectives correctly, for both players. This mostly affected Missions in locations not tracking correctly for both "Location Objectives" and for the "Challenges" system. These are permanent to your save. You cannot fix them. Other similar things are Relay Beacons not counting, and with Alpine DLCs - Collectibles and Weapons are not counting sometimes.
In many cases quest NPCs were invisible for both players in COOP. Player characters would become invisible in menus after some time playing back in 2023, but this may have been fixed. In many cases NPC dialogue would not play in COOP, including subtitles.
Many desync issues - things like players not being on the bike for one player, placeable fast travel beacons not appearing at all for the other player, etc.
Sometimes enemies just don't die on one player's game, making them unable to be looted
Sometimes shooting sounds don't play or particle effects don't display at all.
You can bypass weapon draw animations by switching weapons while the un-ADS-ing animation plays.
Other things I didn't like
Limited player stash. They actually increased it since 2023, but only for the weapons, not for materials, which is still quite limiting. Back in 2023 the amount of micromanaging of the inventory that was required is insane,
My friend bought all the small DLCs near the end of the game and got substantial boost to drop rates for some reason.
Movement feels very floaty and imprecise. Trying to make precise jumps is a nightmare.
Switching weapons is very slow. This includes switching to healing items and throwables/deployables, making the latter really inefficient.
The map is kinda too big, and there's not a lot going on between points of interest. The sheer size of it feels kinda pointless, especially given how bad the transport you get is.
Most of the missions feel like MMORPG filler. No voice acting, 1-2 objectives, just grind basically. With how bloated the game is already, expecting the player to read every note is a bit too far.
Enemies get spongy, especially later game.
Looting is kind of a chore due to carry weight limits and strange item weights (small and large fuel cells weigh the same for no reason, etc), as well as and clunky UI. Throughout most of the game more than half of the inventory space is taken up by weapons, ammo and healing items.
Certain items can only be dismantled 10 at a time. This includes the heaviest objects like propane and fuel tanks
Certain items, such as wood and gas canisters are not shared loot like everything else is
You do not get any skill points after level 30. Lame.
The base building part is just a wave-defense chore. Attacking enemy bases is cool, but having to defending them every few hours is not, if not more often.

Yes, BUT. The concept is very cool, the world itself is quite pretty, but the game feels coarse, lacking finish. Movement is clunky, character animation is awful, but the robots are fantastic. The gameplay is lacklustre and after a little over two hours I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with the hundreds of gallons (litres?) of gasoline I've collected.
It is fun, don't get me wrong, but it feels like it's a game design student's final project rather than a fully funded and developed game. If it's on sale, sure, why not. Will I keep playing? Probably. Will I finish it? Unlikely.