Generation Zero

This game pisses me off so much. Not because it's bad, but because it could be so much better than it is.
The devs seem to just have upped and left, leaving all bugs, flaws and quirks behind, no more expansion of the game world, leaving a bunch of areas completely void of anything more than base vegetation. This game has so much more potential. I don't feel like I want to buy any other games from this developer (unless gifted) until they come back and polish this turd up to the sheen it deserves to have.

Being Swedish myself I really appreciate the setting of this game, there are so many details that make me nostalgic and make me long for the 80's, sans the hordes of murderous robots.
I like the plot, the combat and everything else. The voice actors sound like they come straight out of a B-grade p***-movie, which doesn't really faze me. It sort of adds to the whole Swedishness of it all.
With the first addition of bicycles in the game my first instinctive thought was: Flakmoped!
This staple of Sweden of yore, the 3-wheeled miracle transportation device. I was giddy as a ninny when they added it to the game.
I just keep thinking to myself; Generation Zero MMO. That would be quite something wouldn't it,
or Generation Zero the movie? I'd watch the hell out of that.
Anyway, this game is bittersweet. If you like crazy murderous robots and fighting for mankind's survival and at the same time touristing the Swedish coastal areas of ye olden times, this is for you. :-)
If you don't like unfinished games, strange bugs with Robot bosses spawning deep within the earth (perhaps never to emerge again), through-wall shooting, homing missiles that never detonate, glitchy inventory management, vanishing ammo (almost never happens anymore), and other funny business, think twice.
My clock says 677 hours played, at the time of writing this review, so make of that what you will.
I'm enjoying the hek out of the game (especially MP with a friend), warts and all, but it still pisses me off that it's left in this sorry state.
I'm not formatting this. Pfft. :-P

Generation Zero was the first and probably the best robot fighting game in apocalypse setting I ever played. Not without flaws, like driving physics, but the atmosphere of it is just amazing in every aspect, weather, robots, sound design of those robots, you can feel the mood developers went for pretty well. That's the only game which made me feel scared and tense while praying for my life being stuck inside small countryside house with enemies swarming outside trying to get to you. Seeing Arc Raiders release as another Swedish game, I instantly was reminded of Generation Zero and will definitely revisit it again with friends.

ThE gAmE ThAt WaS ReLeAsEd 7 YeArS aGo HaS bEeN aBaNdOnEd By ThE dEvS
There's a difference between a live service game and just a game. Get over yourselves and cope more.
It's a fun game. It's $25, i got it for $6 on sale. If you're expecting a triple A title for $25 then your opinion already doesn't matter. Go shoot some clankers and build a base.

I have a powerful addiction to this game truly, between the 50hrs on steam and the literal hundreds of hours on console. I loved playing this game from its infancy to its abandonment. From running for your life and sneaking by in the early game fearing every engagement, To deliberately hunting down every rival, tank, harvester, lynx, and firebird you can find in the late game. But tragically for how much I love this game it certainly has some flaws.
1. Ammo used to be semi difficult to really scrounge up a lot of at least enough to take down hordes of machines. Now it's in such an over abundance I find myself constantly overweight from just ammo alone.
2. Once you play for awhile the difficultly even on guerrilla just feels too easy, you learn fairly quick how to cheese every single enemy and not even by trying the majority of the time. Which brings me to my next point
3. The enemy a.i. is breaking constantly, (mostly with the larger enemies like tanks and harvesters) they get stuck in some area's or just lose all motor functions in an open field and don't move. Best part is when the a.i. breaks and the bug that has them shoot whatever weapon they have infinitely happen at the same time.
4. In the games' earlier development it had an amazing sense of being totally alone. Finding clues as to what happened to the entire islands' population through both the main story and environmental story telling was a great feeling. There was a point where I thought about the lack of npc's in the world but once they added the main story overhaul the npc's felt so lifeless and under done, there's only a small group of them in a single safe zone that you vist once the entire game. The way they added it just really killed that feeling of being totally alone in a robot war torn world where you are the only one left. And omg please tell Theresia to sthu she talks way too much in the early game.
5. DLC's are quite fairly priced for the amount of content they add imo, but the story add on's feel semi empty of feeling. The FINX Rising DLC just ends so abruptly with really not much more world building behind it, sure you get to actually interact with a sentient killing machine but the random power stations you find around the map have no lore behind them and sometimes are just in area's that they're have no significant reason to be there besides taking up space. The weapon DLC's are noticeably more powerful than all of the vanilla weapons which I guess I sort of understand seeing as you do pay for these weapons, but to the degree that they are stronger is quite overkill.
6. While we're talking about weapons I'll mention the changes they made to looting, finding a new weapon that was in good condition was an amazing find it was new and better and exciting, and had you using different weapons everytime you found one. And this goes along with the over abundance of ammo that you used to run out of ammo for your guns so you had to either find more via looting POI's or change to a different or old weapon you had to keep yourself from getting caught lacking. But back to looting guns, the first time I play years ago on console I went a decent time without finding either an SMG or assault rifle making early game combat harder and riskier. Now it feel's like every 3-4 loot containers I open has a 2-3 star quality automatic weapon in it really losing the sense of early game struggle and fear of getting in a big fight.
7. The base building gimmick was exactly that, a gimmick they added towards the start of the games' death. Gathering resources for building takes forever and isn't fun. Thankfully you aren't required to partake in that part more than once (for a story mission). The a.i. during the base assaults more often than not, just ignores you in favor of breaking down your base walls. As well as coming in ridiculously sized waves on the hard defense missions. Not to mention how long they last omg they take forever for no reason and the rewards dont feel all that worthwhile.
8. WHY DID THEY MAKE THE STASH BOX CARRY BETWEEN CHARACTERS IT COMPLETELY RUINS NEW PLAY THROUGHS WHY AVALANCHE STUDIOS WHYYY
Finally the good:
1. Guns feel great to use and blow up bots with
2. Game supports multiple ways of taking fights, sneaking, and escaping combat via lootable and craftable equipment
3. Skill tree is balanced and offers fun special unlockable abilities like hacking smaller machines to fight with you, improved emp affects, and a free self revive once per fight. just to name a few. (Later level exp requirements are a little ludicrous)
4. The experimental weapons and rivals updates were the best thing to happen to this game
5. DLC weapons are fun to use (despite being op) and unique
6. Ignoring the story and just pounding out sidequests or just messing around killing hordes of bots just for fun and to waste time is one of the funest ways to play the game
7. Enemies have variants and different way to interact with said variants. Using runners (or dogs as I call them) as an example, protoype runners rely heavily on their mid to short range smg making pistols and smg's effective against them, while military class runner either have a shotgun or high caliber rifle. Shotgun dogs also very often run at you to jump on you and ragdoll you making shotguns and pistols the go to. While the military dogs with rifles sit back at mid to long ranges making assault rifles and sniper rifles the best way to deal with them. There's even more variants with different fighting styles but I dont wanna spoil everything.
8. A lot of houses are copy paste but very few feel like they dont belong or feel empty
9. Added bikes to get around the map faster at the cost of being loud and drawing attention and needing fuel (aka more ♥♥♥♥ to make you overweight faster)
10. The soviet bots invading the northern parts of the island and fighting the original machines in a turf war style was an amazing add to the liveliness of the world, and a great natural progression seeing as you slowly make your way from south to north via the story and side missions
11. Runs great for all that's happening on screen at one time even for lower end hardware like mine
TL:DR Game has flaws, world isn't as great as it once was, was abandoned in a buggy state, and has under gone some questionable changes. But I still suggest picking it up if you have the cash and are looking for a game to just plug into and mess around in for a few hours. You likely wont regret it and will see the greatness though the flaws.

The first 5 hours of this game is great, but afterwards the games flaws show. At first the story is captivating and then you realize that all you do is go to a bunker, get lame fetch quests, repeat. The machines are pretty fun to fight early game, but after a while the gameplay loop ends up being; shoot, run behind cover, reload, repeat. overall this game is worth the money but don't expect game of the year. Its honestly pretty impressive for an indie studio tho.

100km long, 2cm deep. This game had so much potential, but unfortunately has fallen short in some ways. Still worth it though, It's very cheap and still very fun, It's just that it could have been so so so much better.
If I had to mention some great things this game does, I will definitely mention:
Sound design - This game has wonderful soundfx. From your footsteps, through ambient noise, through the soundtrack (especially the soundtrack), ending on gun sounds, It's absolutely amazing and really immersive.
World atmosphere - together with sound design, this really sold this game to me. This world is dark, very swedish (I may be biased because I love swedish landscapes, but that's besides the point lol), and gives you (or at least it gave me) a very very special feel that no other game was able to recreate. Something about just walking around, all alone, with nothing but a gun to your side. Very cool.
Combat - For a game this cheap and that badly kown, the combat (the gunplay really, I didn't touch much of melee) feels incredible. The guns are loud and powerful, extremely satisfying to shoot.
Please give this game a chance, because for all of it's shortcomings which you will definitely notice, It's got a lot of really good fun in it.
I don't really want to mention the bad of this game, but let's just say that the deeper you go, the more it strays away from what it was in the beginning. It's falling short more from a storytelling / story integrity point of view, the gameplay is really really good. Try it out.

I enjoyed this game. I will say I played it while the dev team was still adding things and the majority of my experience comes from trading and interacting with loot parties of 4, with random players from across the globe I would join with from the discord.
This game starts out very survival horror, and doesn't stay that way long, it eventually molds into an arcade open world looter shooter once you get high enough of a level and actually get good gear. The story line isn't much, both in way of animation and storytelling or in terms of effort.
The vast majority of my enjoyment from this game came from looting and building up my arsenal, of which I have multiples of every 5 crown and experimental weapon. Including a full original 5 crown set from the base game which is damn near impossible to come by these day. Which I amassed being and "arms dealer" of sorts, trading older players for rarer guns that hardly show up anymore due to the various gun dlc. Also, collecting rare loot drops and such. And farming them to trade for the ones I didn't have.
The game has 2 raid bosses. Base building which is fun. As well as turrets and various armor things. You also have bicycles, and various dirtbike/trike vehicles. The experimental weapons are pretty cool and unique but eventually you find your play style. You can assign attribute points to build your character into several skill trees. Which you can pick those you find the most useful or not.
You also get robot companion which can be good to offload loot and spot enemies. To me the game really shined playing with others and my brother. That is where I got the majority of my hours from.
The game does have bugs. For example, the robot doggo companion can catch onto enemy corpses and send them flying across the map, so there is a collision problem. At one point I got my robo dog from my brothers base, "unoffically" which there is an official quest for him. Once I unlocked that base myself through the campaign my dog disappeared for a while until I completed the offical quest line myself which reset it.
There are also numerous mods for all the weapons except experimental which are picked up by getting "mats" from various means, whether scrapping or completing base quest lines. All of which is higher level base buildiing/end game type stuff. You also get to mod your clothing to have things like bullet, explosion resistance, etc. There were also fun winter events where you could collect skins for various clothing, weapons, etc.
The game had huge potential, mostly squandered potential. The dev studio only assigned a small team to manage this project and for what they did they did well. However, you will see the same content assets rehashed over and over again in various orientations.
The robots are fun to kill then it become monotonous/predictiable. It would have been nicer to keep that survial horror type feel throughout the game, but after lets say level 25 that all disappears and it turns into an open world run and gun looter shooter. Which isn't bad, if you expectation is to collect loot and build your bases up. I wouldn't expect much more than that.
At this point I would recommend buying it only if it is on sale with the full ultimate bundle if the above interests you. It is abandoned at this point. I worked with the devs in the discord bringing up glitches and other bugs, and they essentially fixed the highest priority ones prior to signing out. It is functional, but isn't perfect by any means. I got plenty of hours of entertainment from this game but that was due to the community and the discord members at the time, as well as playing with my brother. If you have someone to play with I would suggest you get it and enjoy.
But it sometimes bugs me in terms of what could have been. The world itself is very nice and the graphics are cool. But there was a lot more they could have done with this. It is more of a love it or hate it type of deal. I think few people lie in between.