There are stranger things than you in Sweden
Generation Zero
FILLING THE SWEDISH countryside with
robots and 1980s references looked
like such a good idea from a distance.
Avalanche’s game blends Fallout 76 with
Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture and
Stranger Things, 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, Generation Zero 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 boostour 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 Just Cause and 2015’s
Mad Max 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 EVENDENEarly weapons don't pack
much punch, so aim for
weak points.Evidence of a larger conflict
is scattered everywhere.The recreation of the
countryside is one of the
most beautiful we've seen.Of course, robots can see in
the dark, but can you?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 pickedGeneration 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, http://www.generationzero.com, ESRB: T6
VERDICTmaximumpc.com JUN 2019 MAXIMUMPC 91