In the land of ABBA and Ikea furniture, four friends return from an island vacation to their home country of Sweden and find it besieged by robots and devoid of people. This is Generation Zero and tonight you're going to party like it's 1989. Up to four players can drop-in/drop-out across a range of Simon Stalenhag-inspired landscapes. Too bad Stalenhag isn't collecting royalties on it. However, Austin Walker over at Waypoint brings up subtle but important differences between Generation Zero and Stalenhag's work: "Stalenhag is more than just Robot + Sweden + Scale + Fog."
Agreed. But Generation Zero still looks cool and it's pinging hard on my radar. Though I'd be more interested in this game being more of an action-adventure than a shoot 'em up. From fern-matted forest floors to postcard-perfect lakeside municipalities, you're tracking down robotic beasts that run far and wide across the map. That seems to be the premise for taking down the biggest robots. But I have to admit, from a gameplay perspective, that rarely sounds fun to me. The last thing I enjoy doing in any video game is—despite how realistic it may be—having to chase something down and shoot it in the back, or run across it again and again at a later date. I'm open to the idea of these robots owning a sense of self-preservation, though. It all makes sense.
You're tracking robots, robots are tracking you, they've got heat-sensing capabilities, you've got weapon mods that'll at least get you some night vision. The story behind the war, which appears to already be over, unfolds in the environment. War rooms still display tactical maneuvers pinned to the map. Underground governmental structures are carved out of the rock. And every car and home is abandoned or wrecked. The robots appear to have had a certain respect for leaving homes untouched, but automobiles were fair game. The trailer may be avoiding it, but there aren't even any dead bodies lying around, so who knows? Perhaps the populace all evacuated safely (providing those wrecked cars aren't strewn with dead families). I'm just spitballing here.
Salvage parts and weaponry, hunt enemies, and figure out how deep the conspiracy goes on this plague of robots. I hope there's more to the story than just, "We made them but, whoops, they turned on us!"
Generation Zero is coming to PC in 2019.
