Generation Zero feels like three different games across its progression. Early game, you're sneaking around uncharted territory overrun by hostile robots, and you have to pick and choose your fights to survive. Mid-game, you're strong enough to beat weaker bots, but you scrape by in more climactic fights, making your victories memorable. Late-game, you'll be directly provoking fights to salvage tough robots for parts. The first two stages are the best parts of GZ, and while the late-game experience is fairly fun, it falls into a grindy and unsatisfying rhythm after a while. Generation Zero is set in Sweden in an alternate 1980s, where every citizen has mandatory military training to prepare for a Soviet invasion. The player character returns from a camping trip to be attacked by strange robots, sinking his boat and killing his other passengers. He washes ashore to find much of the Swedish countryside abandoned, under siege, or utterly depopulated by the robot forces. Gathering what few allies he can muster from the survivors, he (and potentially other players) work to repel the robot invasion and uncover its origins. Generation Zero has a big focus on open-world combat and fairly realistic weapon mechanics. Most encounters will happen in wide-open fields, forests, and country roads, with the occasional town or factory to spice things up. You won't be getting any help outside of your companion robot or co-op partners, forcing you to rely on your wits and limited inventory to survive. Fighting dirty is the name of the game. If you see robots in the distance when you're low on health, go prone and hide from them. If robots attack you while traveling, go for their less-armored parts like gas tanks or control mechanisms. Hide in buildings to stop larger robots from following you, ambush them with precise shots to their weak points, and craft specialized ammo to rip through their defenses. This is a guerrilla war against a massive foe, so there's no shame in using whatever you can to win! Players gain experience from beating missions, finding locations, and destroying robots. You can improve your character's skills with each level you gain, culminating in hitting the peak of a skill tree. I went for the "Hacker" tree that allowed me to turn robots against each other, albeit with a cooldown and a percent chance of failure each time. Other skills improve your weapon handling, reload speed, overall health, and more. There are also collectibles like story-related documents to find, along with useful weapons stashed in out-of-the-way places. I'd recommend the lockpicking skill above all else, especially in the early game if you're playing it solo. The enemy types are limited but well-designed and memorable. Each robot has a distinct appearance that, when combined with certain paint jobs, help you figure out what kind of threat you are dealing with. Hunters are large and humanoid robots with arm-mounted guns and a ruthless refusal to stop tracking you. Tanks are massive and well-armored bots that can be easily spotted, put up intense fights, and give you great rewards if they are taken down. Buzzers act like Half-Life's headcrabs in the way they leap around and damage you on contact. There are also Soviet robots that will clash with the regular robots, creating chaos and infighting that you can exploit to escape or take down both sides. GZ has a decently sized arsenal of guns, melee weapons, and explosives. They have a quality/rarity system that impacts their performance. You'll start out finding rusty, dirty weapons with weak but manageable stats. The better options are cleaner and better-maintained. The rarest items have custom paint jobs and perform at their peak. Difficult robots have a chance to drop experimental weapons as well, which have effects like shooting electricity-coated bullets to chain damage dealt. It can be frustrating to start out with such pitiful guns and melee weapons, but it makes it all the more thrilling to find a quality weapon in the world or from a strong robot. You can also scrap and recycle weapons to use their parts for crafting, whether it is to upgrade an existing weapon or to make items like ammo. There's also a base-building mechanic like Fallout 4. After a certain point in the story, you will be able to take bases from the machines and rebuild them into Resistance outposts. How you decorate them and lay them out greatly affects resource-gathering operations, where you drill for useful items while fighting off waves of robots. It can be intense to hold out, especially when good loot is on the line! I haven't said much about Generation Zero's story, and that's because it doesn't really go anywhere in the base game. It starts out promising and creates a nice mystery about the origins of the robots. The two main allies you have, a Swedish soldier and a girl who survived the attacks, have contrasting perspective on how to handle the invasion and what might come of it. The presence of the Soviets also adds a lot of intrigue to the plot. However, it's easy to play the missions out-of-order thanks to how they're laid out. The big reveals near the end of the story are done via collectible documents rather than a voiced performance. The final mission is also very anticlimactic, resolving nothing and closing on a "The Adventure Continues!" sort of note. I know that the two story DLCs expand on the premise, but it's disappointing that nothing really gets resolved by default. The late-game experience also gets tedious. As much fun as it is to carve through robot bases and their destructible walls, you can get too powerful and jaded by your enemies. Suddenly, no loot drops matter outside of 5-star or experimental ones. You have more resources than you know what to do with. Beating the story won't satisfy you if you were immersed in the plot. It just feels like a massive grind rather than the intense game of cat-and-mouse that characterized the first two stages of the game. Generation Zero is still a good game, though. Its strong points outshine its weak points, and I am glad I played it. However, it is system-intensive, and you'll need to crank down the settings even on a good PC to make it run well. If you dislike lonely open-worlds or games with lots of traversal, you won't like Generation Zero. You might also dislike how spongy some enemies can be without targeting their weak points. If you can get past those faults, it's worth playing. I'd recommend it on sale.
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