So you basically have to search the entire town door to door.

If you’re looking for a specific person’s house, sometimes you can find it because you have the person's last name and can check the mailbox, which is clever – but I had one mission where I only got a first name, and the indicator only shows up when you’re next door. Some of the missions are simply, 'We know there's a cache of weapons in some old ruins in the area.' If you haven't seen any ruins, you'll just have to roam around until you find them. As a result, finding individual mission locations and objectives can be very frustrating: It can take hours to find a single spot on the map if you haven’t been there before because may not be an indicator on the map pointing you in the right direction. Even though the world is broken up into seven mostly separate sections with their own missions, everything feels very spread out and you receive very little guidance as to where you are supposed to go. What does lose its appeal, and quickly, is not knowing anything about where you’re going. Of course, there’s a limited amount of these props, and over time you will see these elements repeat ad nauseum – there are dozens, if not hundreds of houses across the countryside and only a very limited number of house variations – but the setting never really lost its appeal for the roughly 24 hours it took me to beat the core story missions. The little touches, from 80s-looking band posters to neon floppy disks, all evoke a specific time and place. There’s an impressive amount of detail in the world, especially when you get to town and start searching people’s homes for loot. Some of the best moments I experienced were solitary, simply looking at sunlight cutting through the trees or gazing over a cliff at a nearby town. You spend a good deal of time roaming around an abandoned region of the Swedish countryside, combing forests, farms, and towns for documents or locations that trigger missions, as well as scouring for loot hidden in toolkits and ammo boxes in every house, barn, and car on the side of the road. I was drawn to it because of its aesthetics and vibe in that capacity, it does not disappoint. “Before we deconstruct things, let’s talk about how Generation Zero looks and feels, which is the one thing it really nails. All of these problems blend into an incredibly frustrating grind in which I – whether I was playing alone or as part of a team – constantly felt like I was butting heads with the universe for every measly inch of progress (in a bad way).

Moreover, all of these problems are compounded by gratuitous glitchiness – just about every kind of bug you can think of, you will likely see roaming rural Sweden. Likewise, progress comes slowly and it’s often unclear what you should be doing and where you should go. Enemies can sense your presence from across a field or forest and break up a carefully laid-out ambush in an instant, and too often the resulting chaos is a jerky, janky shootout where the victor is dictated by attrition rather than skill or foresight.

From exploration to combat, much of Generation Zero feels out of whack. For all its great ideas, only a few of these concepts – namely the art and a spooky 80s mystery vibe – play out as well as you’d hope or expect. It is incredibly ambitious, and I really want to be able to tell you that it’s among the most exciting games published in 2019.But it’s not. Though it fits into a clear-cut niche – the co-op survival first-person shooter – it draws clear mechanical inspiration from a range of sources, from PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds to Horizon: Zero Dawn, as well as more directly comparable open-world shooters like Far Cry 5. Its setting, a 1980s alternate history where robots have taken over the Swedish countryside, is fresh and stylish in its specificity. Conceptually, Generation Zero has a lot of big ideas.

Generation zero map km2