Generation Zero

If I didn't know better, I would swear blind that Generation Zero had been made by a splinter group of Bethesda who'd decided that they were going to make a game about big machines, no matter what. Then they went and made that game about big machines and it's the game you find in front of you. It has everything you would initially think to need in such a game: Big Machines.

It’s been two days since my camping trip to a nearby island ended. I expected a welcoming party when I got to Yttervik, but everyone is gone. Cars have been abandoned on the road. Food was left on the kitchen table and front doors are wide open. After searching an abandoned police car, I found a gun in the trunk. Luckily, I made it to the church in Iboholmen after an encounter with odd robots. Sur...

Defend Sweden from a robot invasion

This isn't Call of Duty in the land of Swedish meatballs, it's Boston Dynamics in an IKEA-effect hunting sim. Come for the difficult robot fights, stay for the Arctic Circle sunsets. The technical issues will make you rage quit one day and then bring you back the next.

Generation Zero is the Wonder Bread of video games. It’s solid and does what it does well, but it lacks any sort of excitement and will probably expire soon.

Basically then, Generation Zero is a game of extreme peaks of troughs. At times it’s dreadfully boring; other times it’s wildly exciting. It doesn’t want to make your life easy, but then throws so much resources your way that being downed is trivial. It looks great, but it has a lot of bugs that will only make you able to view the game as ugly. Like Marmite, Generation Zero will dramatically split...

I wanted to love Generation Zero because there are so many good ideas in it that could’ve made for a stand-out co-op shooter, most notably the rural Swedish setting and robot enemies. Upon actually playing, however, I found most of those ideas were implemented extremely poorly, turning it into a frustrating and aimless slog through horribly unbalanced combat encounters. On top of that, it’s full o...

I went into this game with the highest of hopes and the lowest of expectations. Even with the most open of minds I could possibly muster, it’s still difficult to find good things to say about Generation Zero. Overall, Generation Zero‘s incredible atmosphere, mostly beautiful visuals, and great soundtrack feel wasted alongside countless technical issues, horrendous pacing, unbalanced combat, and an...

As you have probably figured out by now, Generation Zero was not in the slightest bit enjoyable for me and it really is such a shame. Avalanche Studios had a really solid base to work off of here and it could have been an incredible experience for players. Instead, to my utter confusion, Generation Zero felt like it was still in early access, at best. It truly was a soulless and painful experience...

Periodically beautiful yet consistently broken, Generation Zero’s brand of monotonous, sterile and bug-riddled open-world first-person shooting is something that you should avoid at all costs.

This sums up Generation: Zero pretty well. There are some genuinely cool moments buried among the slop. If this were an Early Access title, I’d be very content saying to keep an eye on it as it nears release. Considering that this game is being released like this, I will instead warn not to waste any money on this unfinished title. I look forward to a potential 2.0 release, because I really want t...

Verdict: Generation Zero had some good ideas but most of them were poorly executed. For trying to tap into the survival horror genre by replicating a Black Mirror episode would have been quite impressive. Although with the lack of character creations, unable to create new saves, stuck fighting for 4 or 5 hours, and graphical bugs might want people waiting for a Steam sale or Microsoft store deal. ...