Generation Zero Review – Not Quite a Zero, But Pretty Close

What can I say in this  Generation Zero Review? I really wanted to like this game. It offers you the ability of having an open world environment and killing Evil Robot Monsters with your friends. If you’ve ever seen that episode of Black Mirror with the evil robot dogs (Metalhead), then you have a pretty good idea what Generation Zero is about.

What is going on with Character Creation?

The character creation screen is something else in itself. The women characters.. well.. just have a look. The is plenty in game items that will change this look, and that part is kind of neat, but I’m not sure what happened here.

They also spent a ton of time on Emotes that I never used.

Environment of Generation Zero Review

The game is set in Sweden and everything is written in Swedish but translated to English so that part was kind of cool. You start off with a basic tutorial that helps you walk around the environment and understand how things work. You will need to collect guns and ammunition in order to fend off the evil robot monsters.  

The environment is beautiful there is lots of beautiful trees and grass and nature to look at. The houses are a basic template that unfortunately are repeated over and over and over again. Strangely, almost every house contains several chess boards. A house might have the bathroom to the right and a bedroom to the left the next one will have the bedroom to the right and the bathroom to the left. Otherwise there is no difference between the locations for the most part. 

I actually thought the sound in game was pretty good. The music was suspenseful and had a nice Sci-fi feel. No complaints here. Let’s continue this Generation Zero review.

The inventory is similar to Resident Evil style. You need to have enough slot space for all the items you pick up. There is this really weird thing with the ammunition.  You need to go into the inventory menu and right click and add the item to your gun.  I guess this is because there is different types of ammo like piercing or explosive or whatever.  That part is fine but the issue here is that if you don’t right click the default ammo into a gun, the game will show you as having zero ammunition. Of course there is no tutorial for this ammo part either.  An annoying little “feature” to be sure. 

There are no NPCs.  There is a storyline that happens as you walk through the various cut and paste cookie cutter locations and pick up certain items.  The storyline is basically track the survivors to this location. The survivors are not here. Where have the survivors gone? Track the survivors to the next location. And so on.  It repeats the same theme for a good portion of the first few cities. I went through each area in order, clearing out each city of all of its collectible items. No additional things happened. Nothing new was added. It was just  same monsters,  enter the same house, look for the same collectibles.  I was pretty disappointed with this.

Repetitive Gameplay of Generation Zero

I opened up the world map to determine if there was perhaps a larger boss locations farther in. I found what looks to be a large city quite a bit away on the map. I set my marker point and started running towards it. It took about literally 15 minutes of real time running straight in order to reach this location.  You are able to avoid the monsters that are chasing you as long as you just keep running I found out. I finally reached the major city and there was the same six monsters. Now there were a lot more of them and because I had ran through to the city I was obviously very underpowered for this many robot monsters. Unfortunately though, it was once again the same cookie-cutter location here. There was just more buildings and monsters and loot in a concentrated area.

What a disappointment.

Final Thoughts Generation Zero

I feel this game had a lot of potential but that it’s just not complete.  The environment was great and I like the idea of the Robot Monsters and collecting things but without NPCs or any other real threat it was just the same thing again and again.  This game kind of felt like a poor man’s Fallout 76 and that’s saying something. I can’t recommend this one folks.

I was provided a copy of this game to review. Thoughts as always are my own.