Generation Zero: Avalanche Studios, Fighting Robots in 1980s Sweden

After seeing Just Cause 4’s reviews, and piss poor post-release support. (5 weeks for a patch!) I will wait and see how this turns out.

Avalanche Studios seems to have lost some key staff or is cutting corners somewhere.

Or spread too thin.

On one hand, yay for a cheaper price! On the other hand, launching as a “budget” title makes me wary.

They have 2 subsidiary studios: one in NY that made JC3 & 4, and one in Sweden. Avalanche also got bought by a film company last year. It’s clear the spinoffs are not the same caliber as the team(s) that made JC2, Renegade Ops, and Mad Max. With new ownership, 3 studios working on many projects, and most of their games having different staff (I do see Magnus Nedfors on JC1/2/MM/Rage2), the label is a crapshoot.

That said, aside from the dull first trailer, Generation Zero has my interest for the “open world co-op Far Cry with robots” angle. I hope it turns out well, but the beta feedback and odd price have tempered my optimism.

That looks good. The only part that worries me is that they always show the game with four players. I wonder how single-player friendly it will be.

I’m guessing ‘not very’. But hell I’m going to get it and play SP anyway.

This “review in progress” doesn’t sound all that great…

Almost every house that the player enters is identical, making the world feel cheaply constructed. Once we entered a “major” town that had about 10 identical houses, we simply gave up on the story and just booked it as far as we could go. And you know, maybe late-'80s Sweden is like 1960s American suburbia with the “little boxes” that all just look the same, but damn it makes for boring exploration and gameplay.

My buddy mentioned that it feels like Avalanche made a battle royale map and then pivoted somewhere in development, and he couldn’t be more on the nose. A whole bunch of copy-pasted buildings with some points of interest on a mostly-barren topographical map feels very much like a battle royale map, not to mention the awful PUBG -esque inventory UI. I’m in no way implying this is what happened, it just has that feeling.

While I’ve exclusively played with a partner so far, I can’t imagine playing solo is enjoyable in the slightest. Most of my memorable moments were from mess-ups or wacky co-op moments which would not be possible solo. Plus, the harder robots have weaknesses on their backs, which is much harder to get to solo. There are distraction items (like radios and boomboxes), but they are single-use and I feel like that would get stale.

I swear, watching the promotional videos for Generation Zero , having actually played the game, feels like I’m being bamboozled. What game is that? Why don’t my graphics come close to that aesthetic? At times it looks beautiful, and at others, it looks like a Half-Life 2 mod.

So yeah… That put quite a dampener on my hopes and expectations!

This was so unbelievably frustrating with Halo 5’s Wardens on the harder difficulties during my solo runs. And the fact you had to fight that sonofabitch several times throughout the campaign actually angered me.

This game is being marketed as 1-4 players, but design decisions like this make me wonder how much of a solo experience the game actually is. At least they have boom boxes, wish Halo 5 did.

In the beta I went into a church and found four boomboxes. I saved there and later when I reloaded the boomboxes had all respawned. So I took those too. Then it turned out if you quit to menu and reloaded they’d all reappear again.

I ended up crawling over the Swedish landscape with a pistol and about fifty tape players.

On the plus side, I had a lot of mixtapes.

It’s a “budget” title, so I expected some heavy copy-pasting.

Sorta feels its being sent out to die , in the shadows of Anthem and The Division 2.

Doubt people will even remember it released in 2019 by the end of the year.

Yeah going to wait for the deep discounts that are going to hit this sooner rather than later.

Well at least it got 1 positive review!

I hadn’t even looked at the reviews for this yet, and they’re much lower than I expected.

It seems that except for the middling Mad Max, Avalanche Studios has been churning out shitty title after shitty title for the last 9 years since Just Cause 2. It makes me worry for Rage 2, a game I really don’t want to suck.

They’ve got the open world technology and art down, but putting a game in the middle seems to be more hit and miss.

Jesus Christ this feels like an early access game from some Unity asset flip outfit. How the Hell is this an actual released game from Avalanche?

It’s their first self-published game. They probably couldn’t devote enough resources to it.

From what I read, the Avalanche Mad Max team is doing the car / world stuff. id is doing the FPS stuff. So if that correct, it could be fantastic.

I don’t understand how Avalanche could push out Just Cause 4 and then support it so poorly. It’s their flagship franchise, or at least I thought it was.

Something is definitely going on, I mean their own site’s news hasn’t been updated in 9 months.