Generation Zero

It's gorgeous to look at, the soundtrack is infectious and the map is well-designed but that's simply not enough to sustain a large title like this for very long.

At the end of the day, I will gladly call ‘Generation Zero’ a good game. It brings new elements and ideas together in a unique setting that hasn’t been seen before. However, the game’s point of difference is also its biggest downfall due to a lack of consistency across all elements of gameplay. Even though Avalanche Studios are constantly working on improving and updating the game, I wouldn’t call it a finished title just yet. Truthfully, I don’t feel that this game is overly suited for the Xbox and would be more enjoyable with a team of 4 people playing on PC. With time, ‘Generation Zero’ could become something incredible, but not just yet.

A little repetitive game that despite its wide map, concludes without interesting challenges.

This game has so much potential, but it is so barren I can’t recommend it. The visual and audio aesthetic are right up my alley, but I found myself bored. It harkens back to the No Man’s Sky release: plenty of space to do absolutely nothing. This feels like early access, not a full retail release. Skip until they announce any potential updates that add content to this.

The world, concept, and exploration elements are fantastic, beautiful and enticing. But in reality, the game itself, and the gameplay as a whole, are a completely different matter. Hard to use inventory systems, and uninteresting battles with what seems like hundreds of robots appearing out of nowhere, do nothing to entice you in further.

The 80's Swedish killer robots invasion plot feels intriguing, but the whole game feels underdeveloped with bad storytelling and clunky gameplay mechanics. Its vibrant and lush external environments are the only good thing in the game, but it's too little to save it from mediocrity.

If Avalanche can improve the inventory system, fix quest tracking, and get it so the enemies can't cheat through walls and other physical spaces, they'll have repaired most of what ails these dysfunctional machines. Generation Zero isn't the game I wanted it to be today, but in a world where games are alive and changing all the time, I'm hoping the singularity is still near.

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 opinion. But it’s not just a matter of taste – Generation Zero‘s glitches and ill-implemented mechanics are just as much to blame.

While the apocalypse is traditionally painted in varying shades of drab brown and grey, here it's brought to life in lovely bucolic greens and yellows. This pastoral loveliness doesn't disguise the fact that Generation Zero is unremittingly, cripplingly dull, providing protracted periods of walking vast distances with all-too short bouts of gunplay. How the developer behind Just Cause managed to create this vacuous, pointless game is beyond me.

Generation Zero is an amalgamation of ideas, some of them pretty decent, but none executed with any great level of confidence. Despite the surprisingly strong atmosphere, gameplay annoyances and serious technical issues prevent it from having a chance to survive.

Generation Zero sports many of the components that you would expect to see in an open world shooter with online play. Whilst entertaining in short doses, and fairly interesting when it wants to be, the whole ordeal has a tendency of being massively undermined by its poor design choices and its several technical issues. Indeed, it’s a serviceable loot shooter at its core, but the developer really should have held the game to a much higher standard.

Generation Zero stumbles on its own concept et never achieves to find balance between shooter and survival. Repetitive and dull, it does have some ideas but they don’t have enough impact to hide all the flaws.