Game completed: Generation Zero

So last night we finished Generation Zero (jokingly dubbed "the Sweden game" in one of my discord servers). All in all we had a good run. We both had fun playing the game, and I really enjoyed the atmosphere of the whole thing. We both agree that the devs had really succeeded in making the game feel like Sweden. 

For the first ten hours or so we had a lot of fun reading all the labels on everything and all the signs. It felt so bizarre to see and hear Swedish in a game. Being in a country where hardly anything gets dubbed/translated unless it's specifically for children it becomes pretty rare to see or hear your language in games. But there was soooo much Swedish and it was so weird and hilarious in the beginning. 

One of our few gripes with the game, though, is that you could have all the sound in Swedish, but you couldn't choose to have the subtitles or UI in Swedish, so before we got used to it it was pretty jarring to hear and read Swedish but everything around it was in English. 

The story is that you're a teenager who wakes up on a beach after a party on an island only to discover that everyone is gone. The world seems empty of people, and everywhere you go there are robots trying to murder you. You find a gun in the nearby police car and then you head out trying to find out where the robots came from and where all the people have gone. 

We have a few gripes with the story progression. While it all makes sense it got very repetitive very quickly. We both hated bunkers at the end, because there were so many of them and at least half of them were huge sprawling things leading down into the earth for what felt like miles with lots of corridors all looking the same so we got turned around and confused a lot. Another gripe is the sidequests. Basically all the sidequests are like "Find out what happened at this place" and you go there and the end result is "Oh, they died." For the duration of the base game you are the only survivor and from feeling kind of cool it soon becomes pretty incredulous. Like all these police and military have been killed by the robots, nobody survived... Except this teenager with a machine gun. Wtf. Third gripe is that the story made sense and worked out until the very end. The ending was very... "That's it? But, but, but... Now what? There's so much left unresolved!" But we figured that everything would be resolved by the end of the DLCs.

Alpine Unrest DLC was pretty cool, but we both got so sick of the Apocalypse class robots. Like telling the Hunters to "Stop BBQing me!! T_T" and everything was radioactive so everything hurt. Oof. The whole island was really cool and there were a lot of fun things to discover and explore (not so many bunkers) and we got some more backstory for the robots. And omg there are people here. Actual, real NPCs. Hooray! The story had a really sudden end though. To the point that none of us realized it was over at first. 

FNIX Rising DLC was probably my favourite. We found out exactly where the robots came from and who controls them and how that came to happen. The FNIX class robots were tough, but not annoyingly so like the Apocalypse ones. The whole DLC was action from start to finish. But once again the ending left too much unsaid and unresolved. These devs seem great at making stories, but not at finishing them. Maybe it's a way to leave people wanting more? But it's done wrong and it's mostly just frustrating than omg I need to know more.

Level is capped at 31, which seems a frustratingly odd number to cap it on. There was a point midway through levelling that things got really fricking hard. We were both left completely frustrated at how things were going for us. Then we got our first Experimental class weapon and suddenly we started to breeze through a lot of things. Some epic fights happened later, but they were epically awesome and not just awfully frustrating. There's an annoying amount of inventory management too, mostly because you kind of need to pick up everything so you can craft things, but everything has a weight and your character is just your average teenager so their carry ability isn't great. I absolutely hated that ammo was weighted. Especially since I favoured the Pvg sniper and its ammo weighs a shit ton. 

The lore in this game was great and I enjoyed discovering all the little bits and pieces from notes and photos and cassettes. The game takes place in the late 1980s so a lot of the technology and logos were very nostalgic for us. I didn't exist in the 80s, but a lot of those things stayed around for ten more years so I remember a lot of it. 

All in all it was a fun game, but it left a few things to be desired and many things were super repetitive. We still had fun with it, though, and I could imagine playing it again.