Generation Zero

I love it. I don't care if it isn't perfect (and it's not, yet). It is not a shoot-em-up. Forget it, it isn't. It's an experience. I'm an ex-Royal Marine, and I can lose myself in it completely. The right rules generally apply, and strange things like a machine sticking its sword through the wall into me, I can forgive, while wryly thinking that given a wooden ship-lap house, a machine probably could. They'll fix that, and other stuff.
It is slow and immersive (at least how I play it), you use the rain, you sometime wait for night, the rules of cover-from-view/cover-from-sight actually apply. I never use roads for instance, unless I am ambushing something, and I cross at a run into cover the other side.
If you want action-action-action, buy Doom.
This is brilliant.
I've read some of the other reviews, and grinned. I understand that they want big rewards, but what rewards would there be? You are living in a deserted world, being hunted and trying to find out why. I turned the hints off - I didn't want to be told. I didn't use the hud, except as a compass - I looked, and found all the same things. Slower, but I found them. I found them because they were where they would be. As for me, I like space between excitements. I like creeping up on things and destroying them. Occasionally, I like to be besieged in a Church by ten Runners, four Hunters and two Tanks and walking away alive at the end.
I just love it.

Generation Zero - what kind of game is it really?
Well first of all it's not a game for everyone because if you compare it to a generic open world, survival game it doesn't have whole lot of gameplay variety. It's an exploration shooter at heart, with survival elements, big map, robot enemies and very minimal story. Minimal in a way that it's in form of old radio messages, recordings, letters and in form of combat aftermath tidbits in environment.
Personally after playing almost 40 hours I couldn't find whole lot of info about the story. It's mostly just short info from some survivors here and there fighting the robots, messages that cut out without meaningful info. It's also not that easy to even find story items as you have to literally search for smallest pieces of paper with no real indication on map or HUD. I mostly enjoyed the big map, beautiful environments, fighting robots, customizing my characters clothes and weapons. So if you want crazy story plot, sorry I couldn't really find much.
As you begin the game you can create male or female character which is nice. There's decent starting variety of clothing and looks, but don't worry you can pretty much find all the clothing, accessory, hair items in game from character creator and more. Customization is great but unless you play with friends no one will really see it, sadly third person view is only possible for dancing emotes.
Characters develop through 30 in game levels, each level gives you skill points you can assign in skill tree of your choice, however be warned that you can't reset skills so pick wisely. At the end of every skill tree you can pick specialization, I recommend the survival tree. It has most useful skills like larger inventory, more health, more stamina, better stealth and more. Also some of tech tree skills are handy, like additional ammo and useful equipment from downed robots.
Main way for you to kill enemies will be weapons (pistols, smg's, shotguns, sniper rifles, assault rifles, rocket launchers, etc.) and explosives (grenades, propane tanks, junction boxes or anything with flame symbol, etc.). Almost every weapon in game has attachments you can use, like sights, silencers, bigger magazines, scopes and more. You can find weapons and attachments of different quality, from 1 star to 5. The higher star, the better. Each weapon can use multiple types of ammo, some do more damage to armor some more damage to robots electronics under said armor. Hovering cursor over ammo or attachment will highlight the weapons it's used for.
Besides all the fun stuff you can also find different kinds of medkits and injections for survival. Different kinds of lures (flares, fireworks, boomboxes, emp's and other devices from downed robots) to either attract robots or disorient them. In the end you don't have to kill every robot you find, it's easy to avoid them if something is a bit too powerful for you (binocular skills in tech tree can be useful to determine robots level).
Enemies aka robots come in many shapes, sizes and numbers. The smallest ones look like robo-dogs, rather quick and roam in packs up to 6. Some are smaller some are larger, there are also default and military versions of every robots. Military ones are equipped with better weapons and armor. Another type of robots look like humanoids, around 2-2.5 meters tall, walk on two legs, can run quite fast and have melee pounce attacks, machine guns, tiny spider robot pods and rockets. They roam in packs of 3 to 5. There's also flying robot that scans environment for humans and if successful sounds a loud air horn that attracts everything in the area to you.
All robots have weak spots, if shot can do heavy damage or instantly kill. For example robo-dogs have explosive fuel tank on their backs, if shot will blow up the robot. Remember all the explosive stuff I mentioned, a good boombox playing music near a explosive source is a nice way of dealing with robots. Just make sure you're not in the detection range when you use the music box.
Deadliest and largest robots in game are tanks and harvesters. Tanks are huge things on two massive legs, around 4-5 meters tall with weapons that can one shot even high level characters. Usually equipped with heavy machine guns, strong sonic attacks up close and rocket, gas launchers. Best to avoid or kill from range with good aerial cover and team as frontal armor is very thick, best to flank from behind. Harvesters are slow, non aggressive robots, usually escorted by smaller ones. They tend to not attack, however if you get too close watch out for rocket salvo.
World map is very big with places to explore, buildings to rummage through and collectibles, weapons to find. There's not whole lot of loot though, mostly customization items, medkits and ammo. Only lootable containers are in shape of toolboxes, long wooden crates and backpacks which I found a bit underwhelming. Essentially you can enter all the houses, they have detailed interiors but often hold almost no loot and since you don't need to eat and drink the houses are useful only as cover.
Once in a while you will come across safe houses, those are your quick travel points and spawn points if killed. You don't lose anything on death, at least I didn't notice losing anything but time. As of yet there's still no way to store your items, you haul everything yourself unless you make another character and transfer things that way. Simply get to safe house, drop something, go out to main menu, pick other character and you will spawn where you were. Or you can ask friend for help. You can also drop items for others in game which is handy.
What else to say. Game has day and night cycle, there are forests, lakes, rivers, big enough hills to fall to your death. There're also areas with snow and weather in general, like fog, rain, thunder, etc. Essentially this game is exploration simulator with robots as the story is very limited to the point of non existing and you have to switch in game audio to English every time you restart, because it will default to Swedish.
Performance wise it's very power hungry, it will use your GPU and CPU to the max. I ran this in 900p window, medium settings just to reduce the constant usage from 100% to 70%. On GTX970 and FX-8350 it can handle High preset but constant 100% idle isn't that great even with 60 fps. Anyways, make sure you research before you get it, because it might not be the game for everyone. I enjoyed exploring environments and occasionally shooting robots, that's about it. If you want this game for story, you better get something else.
Thanks for the read. ;)

Played this multiplayer only, with a keyboard and mouse.
I can see why this wouldn't be enjoyable for single player however multiplayer was actually, really good fun. I had the music off throughout (although its also very good) and turned off nameplates to make it more immersive and actually, this also made the game a lot more fun.
Bad :
There are bugs there is no getting away from it. what i found is if you press ESC while in a container it stops you from going back in if you need to clear your bag (can be a pain, especially if there is good loot in there - work around it just to pres the cancel button). my game probably crashed twice or three times over a 19 hour period.
Missions are repetitive and very fallout 76. when you arrive at the area it is, pick up a note or destroy some robots etc. and there isn't really any deviation.
Inventory management is annoying but not unbearable. Different ammo "types" for each "type" of ammunition also took a while to get used to and i'm sure it makes a difference but i really had no idea tbh. There are weird stack limits, some med kits stack to 20 and the next level up only stacks to 10 so actually i didn't know if it was worth it that much.
Some of the Skill benefits should of been standard abilities or more inclusive. you need a skill to spot robots, one of the skills lets you see the components on them but for me however, this only worked for one type of robot.
And Despite the above, i still enjoyed the below.
Good :
Game is very pretty. Weather system is also very very nice with the snow as an example. And there are light rays that actually work. fighting Tanks at night is also great because of the lighting effects.
Sounds are great. Good gun sounds, robot sounds and the music is awesome.
You can be swarmed by enemies that make you hide in containers or buildings for cover. makes the game intense and in multiplayer very good fun. making your approaches tactical and you prioritise enemies.
Huge map, to get around it you get Bicycles which is quite comedic, also unusable if you aren't on a road and if you have the perk you can out run them. if you sprint into one while someone is riding it they fall off, providing endless entertainment.
Ammunition can be scarce if you pick fights you cannot win or don't have the perk to increase the amount you collect.
the fast travel system works... kind of. you can fast travel to safe houses which is great, however also you have to place down beacons, which run out after x uses, or additionally if you exit the game which was annoying. personally, its a pretty game and the encounters are fun so this didn't bother me at all.
Summary,
It is not a £30 game. This is a solid £20 game if you play multiplayer. This game i don't think is really aimed at being for single player and if it is it doesn't do it well. If you could mod the crap out of it, it would be awesome.
The game doesn't live up to the concept, the concept could be truly awesome but the game play i still found to be very good fun.

I know GZ has got some issues and yes they can be very frustrating but when it works its very good.
Open world , you plan what , when and how you want to do so one minute its all stealth , then you are in a ruckus with 8 hunters ( and yes I got them all).
Its worth the money , its not a rip off .
I only really like single player games and this suits on PC for me.
I'm a 58 year old retired plodder really but it really does get the grey matter turning over.
Its not for everyone but I for one , am totally fed up with BF and COD.

I'm not going to praise this game into heaven, because it's not that good. But it is definitely worth a try. I'll begin with the first impressions, then tell something about the general gameplay and finally the replay value.
First impressions:
When Ifired up the game for the first time I had already read a few reviews, which were mixed. I had read about bug reports, crashes, but also about the massive immersive world and the machines. The latter were enough to make me buy the game.
The game starts fast and smooth; within 30 seconds I was inside the game world. Nice!
I found myself on a shore, close to a small house. The looting began. I expected a survival game and was pleasantly surprised I picked up my first gun right at the start. At least some shooting to do!
Finding stuff and managing your inventory was pretty easy, which I like. Not too much struggles with tons of items and crafting stuff, that isn't really my thing. I like looting and action, which I went for right away. My first encounter with machines was delightful. I found out the shooting mechanics are very good and the enemies look and move realistic. They seem to be pretty clever and you can play with them, knowing there's danger in their behaviour.
To sum it up, a pretty good first impression. No bugs or crashes (I use Windows 10 and have a descent machine) other than some sheds that are hard to enter because the floors aren't aligned with the surface they're built on. So far so good!
General gameplay:
I already mentioned machine behaviour. They are cool! They are clever, and the variety of machines is awesome. Although there's only 6 types of machines, their appearance and behaviour is so distinctive that you have your hands full. You need to find certain approaches and see what your weapons do to them in order to find what weapons are best suited to take them out. Their hit boxes are well thought out. Aiming for delicate machinery parts and the head pays off. Bigger enemies are very challenging in the beginning, and by making clever use of explodable devices is the way to go with those.
The game world is fantastic. You really imagine yourself in a living environment. Especially the lighting effects are crazy. As if ray tracing was already applied. Really impressive! Many people complain that there's a lack of variety in buildings and stuff, but I disagree. Of course, not every house is unique, there's a somewhat small stock of basic buildings that are accessible and the inside seems rendered through algorithms, so sometimes you find a house with 3 bathrooms (!) and just two bedrooms, but who cares. The fact that there's a certain repetition in the houses means it will be easier to find loot boxes in them.
The way the world is filled with differing areas and villages, is very natural and perfectly balanced. And if you know Sweden you will notice it is actually a very good resemblance.
The quests you pick up and follow throughout the game, scattered like breadcrumbs on the moth obvious path, are nice. You are searching for answers to what the hell happened to the people, and I found it funny enough to do. Sometimes you loose track of a mission because you might have picked up stuff previously before the mission starts. That can be a bit confusing, but the menus help you out with a good overview of all activities.
The game is designed to be played cooperatively with 4 players max. But you can go hunting alone easily. However, playing with a buddy or two can be joyful. There's a complicated skill tree that obliges you to follow certain specializations, because with ranking up you can't gather enough skill points to get all the skills. That encourages you to find a specialization that will suit best with other players. Like medic skills, or sniper skills, or explosive damage etc.
It's not always easy to connect to other players. Most fun is to play this game with friends. But you can also find random players. If everything works well, that is. There's occasions where connecting to others causes the game to crash. The way people connect to eachother is actually not very stable. But on many occasions I was able to connect with friends and we had a great time together :)
Replay value:
I have spent close to 200 hours in the game now. I finished my carreer completely and ranked up my first character to the max (level 31). I also started the 3 other characters and was working my way through getting the second char, up to speed. You can have 4 characters max and you can form each of them in your own way, making different choices in the skill tree. This is a clever approach and would definitely add to the replay value. However, there's certain things that don't.
First of all there's the bug fixing and tweaking the devs do to the game based on player feedback. They handle the game in a way as if it was an early release game. They completely change loot regeneration, item drops and damage for explosives. They even tweak the main missions based on the player feedback.
Well, at least they take care of flaws and bugs, but they really seem to overdo it. I like a game to be somewhat predictable. I hate it when after a tweak suddenly you won't find certain ammo types anymore, or your explosive devices only do a 3rd of the damage they used to do. Essentually, my opinion is that all these settings were pretty good when the game launched. The tweaking had some good results, on adrenaline shot drops in the game world for example. But on many occasions they broke some coold features instead of making things better. And they always managed to fuck something up elsewhere, needing to patch that the next time, or even hotfix a patch because the game became unplayable for a group of people. Weird.
The devs promise an evolving game world where new areas will be unlocked, more quests will arrive and more enemies and features will be added overtime. This is what I really am hoping for, because after my 200 hours and not enough friends to play the game with I'm done now. I got annoyed by faulty updates, where they messed up the gameplay. Suddenly lots of loot boxes were empty and big enemies would take so many rockets / explosives / bullets to bring them down it was almost unplayable. For each now you had to spend an hour looting before you would have enough to face another big one. And the stuff they would drop wasn't even a fraction of the ammo you'd need to kill them. They have recently fixed that problem (june update 2019) but it scared me away from the game. The fun factor was suddenly gone.
Conclusion:
I think this game is worth its 35 bucks. It has a great environment, nice story, good coop and excellent gameplay due to clever AI enemies and good shooting mechanics. The light effects are simply brilliant.
I've had lots of fun with this game and if you are the type of person that can stand a slowly evolving game where you have to spend time to get good gear and find bigger enemies, you're going to have fun too. Most bugs seem fixed now, so hopefully they paved the way for new content. This game definitely has potential.
Many people complain that the world is too empty. Not enough enemies, not enough things happening around you... well yeah, let's make yet another farcry game where everything is chewed through for you so that every 12 year old can find its path towards big guns and rep. Nah, seriously, I think the game is good. It's full enough in my opinion. It certainly offers excitement and can be thrilling when you suddenly find yourself cought by a patrol of machines, or enter an area with just more enemies than you'd expected.
Let's hope the devs don't let themselves push too far from their original ideas with the game, because it is good and balanced. And lets hope for all the new stuff that is being promised.
The game is advertised to being a survival game, but I wouldn't call it like that. It's more like an open world adventure with lots of shooting :)

I really, truly dig this game!
My friends and I were looking for a cooperative survival style game, and in my research Gen Zero came up. We've enjoyed the hell out of it! So much so that I really want to share my/our feedback here.
This game feels like a passion project for some (many?) of the developers. Much of the game world has been created quite well, and the detail added to several aspects of the game have given me pause on more then one occasion just to appreciate the work that's been put into it. Some examples:
Saab Viggen combat aircraft parked in hangers or crashed in fields. Appropriate aircraft for 80’s Sweden, and I suspect something the game developers had to build themselves from scratch (I don’t imagine there’s been much need for a Saab Viggen game artifact previously). And with attention to very granular detail: the engine is shown with the thrust reverser deployed (apologies for those of you reading - I'm an aircraft fanboy). In any case, I really appreciated that attention to detail.
Recently plowed fields with water collecting in furrows, with the morning sun rising at an angle that results in a very beautiful reflection.
The audio engineers absolutely deserve recognition for the work put into this game. I use audio cues in the game all the time. Using a headset I’m able to get an acoustic direction for some enemies (particularly the Tanks and Gatherers in the distance) and a sense for how far away they may be. And the sounds really give a great ambiance to the game as a whole. A harsh wind blowing across the field as we move our way between farmsteads? Yep, I get a sense of cold as I move through the environment. The deep concerning “Thump! Thump! Thump! BWAAAAA” of a Tank in the distance as it's walking a patrol and stops to do…something? Yep, I’m concerned and make sure I’m informing the team. Music playing from radios or boomboxes when deployed? Brings me right back to an 80’s groove.
The audio really elevated the game for me and my crew of friends. Lots of little details that, in aggregate, add to the feel and experience of this game.
It’s a rather large game. At first, I got the sense we’d be confined to a smaller area. But as we progressed it became apparent that there was a lot more to explore. Many more points of discovery in the game and places to trek to than I was initially expecting.
The game’s not a cake walk. Difficulty ramps up noticeably as you progress. And now we’re paying a lot more attention to avoiding the attention of other enemies when we engage – when more units arrive during a firefight, things can get pretty hairy, and quickly. Oh, and when things blow up…they BLOW UP. Usually big. Try not to get into firefights near things that go boom. Like fuel cells. Or gas canisters. Propane tanks - stay clear of ‘em when shooting at / being shot at. Cars. Just avoid cars altogether when fighting. That was a painful lesson learned, I can tell you.
The ability to use team tactics in multiplayer has been excellent. Using in-game skills to identify target types at range, using different equipment load-outs for players, flanking efforts, and targeting weak-points have all been very enjoyable for us. There's far less "run and gun" going on for us (so long as we're not surprised by a patrol, which happens frequently enough to keep us all very much on our toes). It's a good mix of stealthy movement, discussion among the team about how best to go about avoiding or fighting discovered enemies, planning attacks, unplanned results, as well as raw hip-deep in firefights.
This game really does feel like a labor of love by its developers. I’m thankful for that, and very thankful we found it!
Some criticisms:
Inventory gets frustrating to manage. First and foremost, we feel the game needs to be capable of sorting inventory by type. As it stands today, everything in inventory (on-person or in the storage box) seems to be sorted by the order it was added, and that really makes finding duplicates, needed ammo, or specific items cumbersome. It’s particularly challenging when you need to swap out a weapon or ammo type during combat. If you’re not hunkered down in a very, very safe place when that happens, you’re going to get waxed. An auto-sort feature is desperately needed here.
Enemies that float away after being destroyed. This honestly isn’t huge, it’s just a frustration that my entire game crew comments on. Every. Time. It. Happens. It seems to occur almost exclusively with Hunters: shortly after destroying one the “corpse” will suddenly float off into the sky, as if being summoned back to an alien mothership, never to be seen again. It’s a little funny, but we all lament not being able to loot it. Not a game breaking thing, mind you. Just a notable frustration.
Seems like you can’t start up a single player game independent of the state of a multiplayer game (if you’ve participated multiplayer). By that I mean: if you’ve played multiplayer and make a new character, you new character will start in the same place your multiplayer character was last in.
Crafting is… not really something we’re doing. We’re collecting building materials, but lately we’re finding that they’re just adding undesired wight to our inventory and we’re dumping it all as we trek. We've found very few schematics or recipes thus far (25+ hours in, mind you), so we have very little we can craft. Maybe there will be more for us to learn and craft as we continue? It’s a little disappointing so far as the crafting component is something several of our gaming crew gravitate towards in games like this and it was a factor in our selecting Gen Zero.
Multiplayer is a little wonky sometimes. We occasionally have incidents where a player will drop from the session, almost always followed shortly after by everyone dropping, including the host. It’s not been often, so I can only speculate on the cause (which we felt might have been network latency between clients or the host).
Multiplayer being limited to 4 players is mildly disappointing. It’s very clear in the Gen Zero store page and documentation that it’s 4 players maximum, so it wasn’t a surprise. It’d just be nice if a few more than 4 players could be in a game.
I tip my hat to Systemic Reaction, Avalanche Studios, and anyone else involved with the making of Generation Zero. As I said at the start of this review: I enjoy the hell out of this game! I know my friends do as well!

Just bought it. Played it. LOVE IT!!!
I'm only doing this in single player. I'm not really an online gamer, but maybe if I can find time and meet someone worth playing this game online with, that would be something I'm willing to try. I held off from buying this due to bad reviews, but someone on YouTube said that most of everything is fixed for early 2020. So I bought it.
Glad I did.