Platforms: Playstation 4, Windows, and Xbox One (reviewed)
Some games come out and almost seem to scream more than speak right at my interests. When I first heard about Generation Zero, I was thinking I was in for a real treat. A first-person survival shooter with limited resources, tiered loot to find, a robot uprising that takes place in the 1980’s, experience to earn to unlock skills, a synthwave soundtrack, and a rather pretty backdrop? Yeah, sign me up. I mean, we’re not too far off from, mechanically, sounding like State of Decay with a bit of Terminator flare thrown in. How the hell could I not like that? Plus with the development experience of Avalanche Studios (the studio behind the Just Cause series) behind it, odds are good it should be less technically troubled than State of Decay. I wasn’t going in expecting Generation Zero to supplant State of Decay as my favorite game of this type. Even with reining in my expectations a bit, I wasn’t impressed with what was actually delivered.
You start off coming onshore to find your little village abandoned. Not a soul around, you’re guided to get your first bits of equipment and then run across your first robot dog gone awry. This thing is not happy to see you. You’re not really sure what happened, but you can take a pretty reasonable guess that the robots decided humans were the enemy and it was time to clean house. And fighting that first one, you can easily see how they could overpower a village. Just the most mundane of these things has a hefty machine gun on it, is incredibly fast, can hear and see you unless you’re moving carefully, and has the ability to pounce on you and do some serious damage. Your letterman jacket isn’t going to protect you from that.
As you start looking for clues as to where everyone went, you’re forced to start scavenging for equipment in houses and vehicles. Aside from weapons and ammo, you’ll find items that you can use to distract the robots out to kill you. Sound tense yet? I saw the loop there and I was in. It wasn’t too long after that the cracks started to show.
You see, where you’re looking for your loot all start to look the same after the first half hour. After your first hour, even the dilapidated sheds you find across the countryside start looking oddly similar. You won’t even need to give it another hour before you realize you’re looking at the same cookie-cutter building resources everywhere. There’s a little variety here and there, but, for the most part, you’re going to be looting through what seems like the same three house types over and over and over.
Okay, I can forgive that. There’s a surprisingly large world to go through that’s rather pretty to look at it. That should do the trick, right? It would if it wasn’t quite so devoid of, well, anything. You’ll stumble upon the same cookie-cutter building assets over and over and over. The most unique loot you’ll find are clothing items to change up your look that also mildly affect things like how quiet you are, resistance to bullets, etc. For the most part, you’re going to be pulling the same ammo and shitty, dilapidated guns and attachments out over and over at the beginning. There are some “uniques” that you can find by checking notes found in the buildings, but they’re barely discernibly different from the other garbage weapons you’ll find.
So maybe try sneaking instead? If you feel like moving at a snail’s pace through areas where the slightest movement or noise gives the robots a heads up that you’re there, be my guest. You’ll have to go into some areas with a fair amount of the robot dogs early on, and you’re rather ill-equipped to handle them. Avoiding them entirely is nearly impossible. Fighting off more than one at a time is tough. Hell, even if you manage to take them down, they’ll get themselves back up eventually. It takes a while, but nothing you down stays down. You can also use some items (road flares, boomboxes, etc) to distract or disorient them, but, unless there’s some trick I completely missed, those would only actually work half the time.
Great.
Thankfully, the robot dogs haven’t figured out how to open doors or jump through windows, so you can hole up and pick them off from the safety of one of the houses. That’s what I’d say if they somehow didn’t manage to lunge toward you while you’re in the house and their guns clip through the house’s geometry, allowing them to shoot you while you can’t hit them at all.
Great.
There’s a breadcrumb trail of hints as to where the villagers took off to as things started going haywire. You’ll find sidequests that might flesh things out more or reward you with some of the aforementioned not-quite-as-shitty loot. More trouble is afoot though. Quest markers would sometimes not show up at all, giving me little to no indication as to where the hell I was supposed to be going. Sometimes closing the game and restarting it would bring them up, sometimes not.
The breadcrumb hints have some neat ideas that just aren’t executed particularly well. At a certain point you’re supposed to find a few people’s houses in a village. No quest markers for that. You’re given the names of the people and that’s it. What you’re supposed to do is look at the mailboxes in front of the houses to match up the last name so you can go searching through the house to find what you need. Nifty idea, but I had found a couple of the items while I was going through the town earlier, turned off the game, and started it back up. I went so far as to take a picture of my TV with the town map pulled up, go into each house one by one and mark off the houses I searched just to be sure I wasn’t missing one or that one of the important items I was supposed to find wasn’t in one of the dozen houses that the Perrson family lived in. I guess Perrson is 45 times more common in 1980’s Sweden than Smith has ever been in the United States. Anyway, after going through this routine twice with no luck, I figured I had gotten the gist of how the rest of the game was going to go for me and threw in the towel.
What about the skills you can unlock though? I mean, the ability to earn experience points and beef up your character is enticing. It feels like a perfect fit in Generation Zero with the escalating threat that the variety of robots that you eventually encounter brings. Unfortunately, the pace at which the experience is doled out is way too slow. I was thinking I could “grind” a bit and get my character some abilities that curb the difficulty of the combat, but I was gaining a level every couple of hours at best. And the actually useful skills like marking enemies are locked behind something like reducing weapon sway, making it nearly impossible to make any sort of real progress.
The rendition of Sweden’s countryside is beautiful, but, like nearly everything else in Generation Zero, that comes with its problems. While the vast expanses of forest are beautiful, particularly when the sunbeams are radiating through the trees, there’s not a lot there. It practically begs you to explore it. The problem is that there’s so little to find, I ended up just sprinting from location to location, only slowing down when a robot was aware of my presence, to advance the main game. Finding yet another damned road flare wasn’t exactly enough of an enticing reward to keep going. Even the synthwave soundtrack is a bit forgettable. It’s catchy for a bit, but hearing the aggressive combat version that pops up isn’t exactly loopable battle music. It started to wear on me after a minute or two, never mind the few minutes I’d be stuck in combat trying to pick off the Terminator dogs.
The bullet-point description of Generation Zero sounds like a dream come true for me. Unfortunately, there’s just so much wrong with it, that I couldn’t help but feel almost betrayed. This isn’t a game that’s going to just immediately lure a mass audience in, but I was the perfect candidate for getting sucked into this thing. There’s some patching that could be done to improve the experience a bit, but there’s too much fundamentally broken with it that it would take a massive overhaul to make it work. The experience points awarded and the loot you find can be fixed. It might be tougher to adjust the skill tree, but adjusting the experience would alleviate that. You can fix quest items and markers not spawning. What you can’t easily fix is the vast swathes of nothing there is or buildings that all look the same inside and out. Generation Zero seemed like it was going to fill that State of Decay itch for me this year, but it looks like I’ll need to actually play State of Decay again for that.
