Generation Zero
There are stranger things than you in Sweden
FILLING THE SWEDISH countryside with robots and 1980s references looked like such a good idea from a distance. Avalanche’s game blends Fallout76 with Everybody’sGonetotheRapture and StrangerThings, with nods to the art of Simon Stålenhag (look him up, thank us later), and the end result is one of the most beautiful recreations of a natural landscape we’ve seen in videogames.
A co-op shooter for up to four that can be played solo, GenerationZero suffers most from its emptiness. It’s a slow starter, the lack of human NPCs beyond a few corpses contributing to a fantastically eerie atmosphere, but it’s also repetitive. The houses and outbuildings you search for the backpacks that contain anything from clothing to ammo to fireworks are depressingly similar, the same meals on the table, the same boxes and bicycles in the garage.
And while it may feel like a survival game, it isn’t. There’s no need to pick up food and water. The first aid kits you weirdly appear to eat significantly boost your health bar, and any clothing you pick up is hived off into a separate section, rather than going in your main inventory. Which is a bonus, because the inventory is awful—a grid-based system without easy access to items in the heat of battle, and if you have a stack of items assigned to a quick-access key, any more of those items you pick up don’t stack with it.
Frustratingly, there is so much good game design here, fighting to get out. While the enemy robots are initially thin on the ground, the way they escalate is intelligently paced, the distance you trek into the map defining what you’re likely to face. There’s a visual feedback system to tell you if your shots are doing damage, and the indicator that you’ve been spotted gives you loads of warning, allowing for a stealth approach to combat in most instances. Sound is integrated well, and radios become as useful for distracting bots as fireworks are for stunning them.
One early battle took us by surprise, with more robots than we’d faced up to that point, especially as we’d just picked our way through an empty village where a burning tank suggested we’d find something to shoot at. Robot models are few, making it easy to identify each by its silhouette, and the time period means they have fuel tanks, rather than tiny batteries, making one-shot kills a real possibility. Flying bots make an analog modem noise when calling in reinforcements, helping you track them down for dispatch.
The dev behind JustCause and 2015’s MadMax can do better than this. It’s a beautiful world and enticing premise, but it’s too slow, with too many frustrations, to fully recommend. –IAN EVENDEN
VERDICT 6
Generation Zero
CYBERNETIC Beautiful world, beautiful idea; fun with friends.
ANAESTHETIC Too-pervasive feeling of cold emptiness; quickly becomes repetitive.
RECOMMENDED SPECS i7 quad-core or equivalent; 16GB RAM; GTX 960/R9 280.
$35, www.generationzero.com, ESRB: T