Generation Zero

OK first off let me say I completely understand how this little game is getting slated so much, however, I personally loved it. Sure its hard to start off with, but avoiding combat ( to start with), stock piling ammo, exploring what (lets be fair here) a visually decent and ever changing environment, the game becomes less and less challenging to the point of being able to obliterate all but the largest of enemies.
I'm going to get the bad stuff out of the way first. There's been lots said about the cars, bunkers, houses etc all being the same. TRUE, it's been said that once the tutorial island has been completed it becomes feckin hard. TRUE. The crafting system is utterly pointless TRUE. The fact that most of the skill tree skills should be included as part of your charachter right at the start TRUE. Most of the other negative points mentioned in reviews are true, but you must try and get past these (to me) fairly un-important things.
We all buy our games based on reviews and for me, also price, screenshots and whether I think it will be like any other games that I have played previously.
I'm a more ahem, vintage player. My days of COD, DOOM and other frenetically fast paced games are behind me. As my reactions slow, my eyesight diminishes any my tolerance for verbally abusive kids deteriorates I find myself looking for games in which I can escape to, explore at my own pace and savour without having to run round like a blue arsed fly. This little game allowed me to do that. And best of all I was ALL BY MYSELF! This for me is the biggest plus for any game of this genre. Multiplayer can kiss my arse. I'm a selfish, grumpy, middle aged married man and any solitude you get is to be cherished, the bonus being that you can vent your spleen by destroying bloody great robots. So if your reading this and think I like games like Farcry, Assassins Creed, Stalker and especially Fallout or any other games that you can take at your own pace, in whatever order you like, I would like to recommend this game. Before anybody jumps on their high horse to say that its not got half the content of the previously mentioned games or is half as polished, save your breath, your correct but at the time of writing this review it's £5.49 on CD Keys and I got 45 hrs of pleasure (and initial frustration) and peace. To me that's a fantastic result.
My advice to anybody that is wobbling about whether or not to buy Generation Zero is to go ahead and pay your five and a half quid and form your own opinion, it's really not a massive loss.
If anybody's still reading, my advice is to take your time, avoid all un-necessary combat early on, explore everywhere, open all the boxes, stockpile your resources and then go for it but most of all, as Depeche Mode once said, enjoy the silence.
If you've taken the time to read my review, thanks. If you thought it was any good, please give me a thumbs up and thanks again. If you thought it was rubbish. Whatever.
Also if anybody can recommend any good, lengthy, graphically lovely single player games please feel free to recommend them to me as for me it's about the single player experience for me. Thanks

Generation Zero is a game. Sometimes it's survival horror as I'm hiding in a corner, crying, reloading a shotgun as robots surround me. Other times it's a run and gun looter shooter as 3 friends and I use George Bush style tactics on a giant irradiated robot. On occasion it's a walking simulator, in which I pause to use photo mode so I can make a new desktop background.
Most importantly, sometimes it's a very early access game where dead enemies ascend body and soul into heaven, robots phase through solid walls, pointing makes you sprint without tire, and quest markers and progress are as present as my dad at my trumpet recital.
Overall I give it a perfect 5/7. Want a finished/polished game? You're in for a bad time. Accept it for what it is, though, and you will be rewarded for your patience.

Generation Zero has some amazing moments, which is why I keep sinking hours into it.
A fairly formulaic robot apocalypse story, where you play a character who jumps into the middle of a narrative that's already played out, for the most part. Humanity has been routed, the robots have consolidated their positions, and you're the only living human left in the area (I play single player, only, and think multi-player would take away some of the sense of dread the game creates).
The story, as it plays out, isn't all that great, but the environmental storytelling and sense of mystery (and, as stated, dread) is pretty much top-notch. As the narrative drives you to wander about this open world in search of supplies (weapons, ammunition, crafting materials, etc.) and to piece together what's happened, you come upon many scenes that tell volumes without the need for a narrator (or found tape recordings or diaries or similar): collapsed buildings around a destroyed, dump-truck-sized war 'bot and burned-out tanks and dead soldiers tell you all you need to know about the power of these machines. Piles of luggage and scattered personal items around the door of a bomb shelter speak to panicked crowds that fled the onslaught. A burned-out island refugee camp and numerous signs of last stands all throughout the various towns and villages tell tales simply and brutally.
The environments, themselves, are also dynamic, with excellent day/night cycles and weather, to include really good wind, rain and snow effects. Positional sound is excellent, too, and the sound design of the robots is some of the best I've ever heard. If you've spent much time around armor or cavalry units, the mechanical sounds of the robots will really strike a nerve. One of the best, and subtlest, examples is in the turbine whine made by the larger robots (especially the Hunters), which ramps up and down dynamically as they move around. Combined with the hydraulic whirring and the clump of metal feet on the ground, it all sounds very "correct". And when the larger 'bots' footfalls start shaking the ground around you, it gets pretty terrifying.
Another note about sound design: the various semi-organic sounds the robots make as they apparently employ sensors and ranging equipment and other pieces of kit, sound pretty awesome. Think of the Clickers from "The Rest of Us", but much more mechanical. The larger Tanks and Harvesters also make sounds similar to the Reapers from Mass Effect when they roll into combat, and you'll come to dread those foghorn blasts.
But the Hunters...they're the *really* terrifying ones. You'll shudder when you hear them, but can't see them.
There's a lot of the expected "Open World Stupid" you'll have to deal with: you *will* get hung up on geometry sometimes. Keep crouching and jumping and moving back and forth and you'll get free. Assuming you don't get torn to shreds by a pack of robot war dogs while you're stuck. You *will* get stuck under an opening truck cargo door. You *will* see robots clip through walls. You *will* wonder why civilian homes are indestructible, even under withering salvos of missiles.
But you'll also have quiet, super-tense moments where you're sneaking across a frozen, moonlit countryside, where the character of the light and the sound make it feel like you're really there, really freezing from that relentless wind, really crunching across a thin layer of snow over a plowed field. 300 meters away, an arc light mounted to the front of a barn-sized war 'bot sweeps back and forth as it searches for you in the night. It's not moving. It's just...watching. And waiting. All around it are Mastiff-sized robot pack hunters on patrol, and you hear the swish-thunk of a group of four Hunters walking up a hill further on from there, their search lights playing over an abandoned farmstead. Any one of them could end you, but you've got to get past them into the bunker they're guarding to find more clues about what's actually happening.
It's really compelling. In the end, Generation Zero only tries to do a few things, but it does them really well, and rewards patient exploration and good strategy. You'll quickly figure out how everything "works" in Generation Zero, but that complacency will kill you, over and over. Because, just when you're patting yourself on the back for threading the needle between a Tank and a Hunter patrol, you'll hear the mechanical squawks of a robot dog pack that's detected you, and you're running for your life.
There's no narrative payoff at the end of Generation Zero, no big reveal, no true denouement. But that's kind of the point: the story's already over before you got there. You're neither the hero, nor the villain. You're not even the private detective, seeking justice. At best, you're a forensic scientist, piecing together the evidence to form a picture of what you didn't witness.
Most likely, you'll never build a comprehensive narrative - you'll miss things. There are a lot of story beats, delivered via notes and telephone answering machine recordings (Gen Zero is set in the '80's, so most of the technology - other than the robots - is period appropriate) and, as previously stated, environmental clues. It's chaotic and disjointed, and remember: it's just you - all alone - trying to figure it out. Many questions are left unanswered. I won't speak to any of the threads I managed to track because, even now, I'm not sure how much of the story I truly figured out. Suffice it to say, good people and bad people got caught up in, or possibly caused, some pretty grim events. There are red herrings and betrayals and personal tragedies, with a little political and social commentary thrown in, for good measure.
The "end" of GenZero is very '80's sci-fi movie appropriate. When you get there, you won't get an emotional surge or anything like that. There'll just be an event that'll have you thinking, "Ah. Sure. That makes sense," and the game will drop you back into the world, to continue playing or not. Alone.
Because humanity already took its last stand. And lost.
Now, it's just you and the war machines.

Generation Zero has a lot of potential, but doesn't seem quite finished yet. We've played 34 hours and are quitting now. There are a few problems with this game (no spoilers):
1. The enemy strength even on the easiest difficulty is ridiculous. We have played endless amounts of shooters and difficult games, but this game made us ragequit a few times. Example: If you happen to meet two Harvesters in one spot (which happens a lot), there's absolutely no way that you can kill them. Me and my husband have just been fighting them for 15 minutes, Thrown everything we have at them (5star guns with armor-piercing ammo, grenadelaunchers etc.), but they constantly spawn hunters, which make it impossible to survive long enough to kill the harvesters. Therefore, the longer you fight, the harder it gets. Then, I died,and respawned in a safehouse, a single step out of the house and I got shot to half health by one bullet from a harvester that was 420m away...Thats outrageous. We learned early on that you just have to go for it when fighting the enemies. There's no point in hiding behind things, and trying to be smart about it, because every enemy will get you anyway, as if walls or other barriers don't exist.
2. There are a lot of well known bugs in the game which sometimes make it impossible to play. Example: In Torsberga you get a graphics glitch where you see flashing lights/orbs in your screen which often cover 90-100% of your screen. You have to use workarounds like red dot scope or flashlight to be able to see 60% of the screen. This bug is known for I think at least 2 months and still has not been fixed.
3. You get a million crafting supplies (steel, fabric, plastic etc.), but can only craft clothes, which seem useless. There should be a crafting option for medkits or other useful items for fighting. After 2 hours of gameplay we knew that there's absolutely no point in keeping crafting resources, so we threw them all away, and now, having finished the game, we don't regret that at all.
4. They added bikes to the game, which would be great if they were mountainbikes. Instead, you get crappy city bikes which basically only work on the road. If you try and go anywhere else you're faster sprinting, since you mostly run through the woods or hills, so to us there, again, seems no point.
5. The inventory is absolutely infuriating. There items within the categories should be listed in alphabetical order or something, because when you are in your storage box and want to check how many Ak's you have, you see an Ak on top of the list, 2 in the middle, one in the end, even if they are the same star rating. Its incredibly confusing. I cannot tell you how many hours I wasted trying to organize my items. It's especially annoying with the weapon attachments, because you get a million of them for a million different weapons. Good luck finding the thing you need.
6. A minor thing, but we didn't understand why we got the credits really early on in the game. We only had maybe 70% of the main missions cleared and after we finished one specific facility, the game was "finished". We kept playing and finished all the missions we could find after that, but still something felt weird about it.
Nonetheless it has a lot of pros:
1. The story is very interesting, you want to keep playing to learn more. Especially the DLC was cool!
2. The missions are clearly marked on the map and the HUD, so you basically can't miss those. Example: When you have to do stuff in a bunker, you consecutively get waypoints which guide you along through hallways and doors towards your goal.
3. The skill trees are nice and make sense.
4. The graphics are gorgeous, Sometimes I just stood on a hill and watched the sun set over a lake.
All in all I'd say this game COULD be fantastic, if the developers fixed and added a few things. However, atm this game is a 50:50 for me. The cons are really annoying, often times to the point of frustration and ragequits. We bought it at reduced price, so it's fine, but it seems like an early access game to us and we did not bother to go for 100% in this game.

Pros: Very nice game overall, actually has a feel of an 1980's Era Map while feeling futuristic at the same time. Multiple variety's of Robots that are able to be taken down from using Sledgehammer to High Caliber Weaponry. A lot of exploration can be done within this game, with the newer November update there is more detail within regions such as the Farmland and the South Coast region.
Cons: Before you get well into the game, make sure to utilize backups, If for any reason your Power may go Out whilst playing the game the Save File will be Corrupted thus forcing you to start a new profile. I experienced this myself, however I was able to retrieve a save file back from the 10th. It will save you a lot of time to create a Backup, you may lose some missions or items, which may be annoying but you are decreasing the amount of stuff that you need to re-complete drastically.
I am happy that the Developers have continued in activity within the game to make it better. However there are still glitches around despite the constant updates which need to be fixed for Players to continue to have an interest in the game. Some glitches are in fact game-breaking or corrupting as previously mentioned which may drive away some people. I am in no way trying to take away from the game, the game is fantastic with the graphics but it needs to have a Failsafe to prevent save corruptions potentially happening to Users.
-----------------------------------------------Back Up instructions--------------------------------
For those who are looking on how to create a simple Backup for Gen Z, Go to Documents, search for "Avalanche Studios. Double click on the Avalanche Studios file. Once you have done that you will see the Generation Zero Folder, Right Click on your mouse and copy it. After you have copied it, I Recommend you create an alternate folder to place the Backup Save in. It is Recommended to name it so you are able to easily find it in case something happens to your active save.
If a Corruption within the Auto Save system happens, head back to your Backup Generation Zero folder via documents, which you have created, copy the Backup Generation Zero file and go to the Avalanche Studios file. Once you are on the Avalanche Studio file, Double Click again and you will see the Generation Zero file. That is the one you need to replace with your Backup Save. Simply paste the Backup file that you have copied before and paste it, you will see a message saying "This Destination has (Number) of Files with the same Name." All you have to do once this appears is press "Replace the Files in the Destination." Once you have done that reload the game and the Save should load all your stuff prior to the Corruption.
If you need help or have a question let me know.

---{Audio}---
( ) Eargasm
( ) Amazing
(X) Good
( ) Decent
( ) Not too bad
( ) Bad
( ) Earrape
---{Audience}---
( ) Everyone
( ) Kids
(X) Teens
(X) Adults
---{Difficulity}---
( ) Dark souls
(X) Hard
() Easy to learn / Hard to master
( ) Easy
( ) Mindless head banging keyboard to win
---{Grind}---
( ) Grind is everything you do
( ) Grindy
( ) Every MMO ever type of grindy
( ) Bareable
(X) Is necessary to progress
( ) Isnt necessary to progress
( ) No grind
---{Game Time}---
( ) Endless
( ) Addictive
(X) Long
( ) Average
( ) Short
( ) Long enough for a cup of tea
---{Graphics}---
( ) Masterpiece
(X) Beautiful
( ) Good
( ) Decent
( ) OK
( ) Bad
( ) Awful
( ) Made on paint
---{PC Requirements}---
( ) Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
(X) High
(X) Medium
( ) Low
( ) Ultra low
( ) Game boy advance
---{Status}---
( ) Daytime New York
( ) Always some people around
( ) Hard to find people
(X) Few people still alive - COOP
(X) You are the only person alive
---{Servers}---
( ) No issues
(X) Minor lag every few hours
( ) Can get laggy sometimes
( ) 1.99$ Servers
( ) Unplayable
---{Bugs}---
( ) Never had any
( ) Minor bugs
(X) Few bugs
( ) Can get annoying
( ) Ruining the game
( ) The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{Price}---
( ) Just buy it
(X) Worth the price
( ) Wait for sale
( ) Maybe if u have some spare money left
( ) Not recommended
( ) You can have more fun burning that money instead
( ) Free
---{Worth playing?}---
(X) Yes
( ) No

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!