The year is 1989 and killer robots have invaded the Swedish countryside. This is the undeniably unique premise of Generation Zero, an open world shooter from Just Cause developer Avalanche. But this is a smaller production than we're used to from the studio. The map is massive, because Avalanche maps always are, but the game itself is a surprisingly lean affair.

You play as one of several silly 1980s archetypes: punk, jock, nerd, and so on. You have a few loose goals including finding out why everyone is missing, locating survivors, and uncovering the truth behind the invasion. But you're never really steered down one particular path. You can make your own goals and explore at your own pace, either alone or with three other players.

Scattered across the map are towns, farms, bunkers, and more exotic locations including a military base. Here you'll find groups of roving robots to kill and loot to scavenge. Occasionally you'll pick up missions, which are rarely more complicated than finding a place and looting it. But I do like how there are no objective markers on the map. You have to read clues and engage with the environment to find what you're looking for. The direction an abandoned car is facing in might point towards a place worth looting, for instance. It's a nice way of encouraging exploration without leading you around too much.

But that's about the size of the game: walking from location to location, battling machines, and collecting loot. Sometimes you'll find an audio log or a document that'll fill in some of the purposefully opaque storyline. But mostly it's just you, a subtle synth soundtrack, the wind blowing through the trees, and the eerie metallic screech when a robot spots you. It's a very slight game, almost feeling like an Early Access release at times. But there is something strangely compelling, and very Swedish, about its minimalism.

The world is beautifully realised, particularly the contrast of menacing sci-fi robots with pastoral Scandinavian scenery. Simon Stålenhag fans will love it. The dynamic weather and day/night cycle constantly shift the atmosphere around you, from hazy golden sunsets to midnight lightning storms. And as you explore you'll encounter leafy forests, rugged coastlines, quaint villages, and rolling farmland—all corrupted by the presence of those sinister machines who wander the landscape searching for flesh to tenderise.

Some machines scamper around on all-fours like one of those Boston Dynamics robots gone horribly wrong. Others are the size of a truck, launching rockets at the slightest provocation. There are six in total, each with their own distinctive weapons, behaviour, and weaknesses. The Hunter is the scariest: a tenacious bipedal giant with a blade on one arm and a cannon on the other. You can fight most of them on your own, but co-op is essential for taking down larger targets such as the terrifying, and appropriately named, Tank.

Alone, Generation Zero is an incredibly tense, almost stealth-like experience. I found myself mostly sneaking past enemies, hiding in the trees waiting for patrols to stomp past or using gadgets to distract them. Throwing flares, fireworks, and boomboxes (it's the '80s remember) will lure curious robots away, giving you a moment to slip past undetected. I enjoyed picking a random direction and trekking across the map, avoiding robot patrols, and slipping into random villages to stock up on supplies, weapons, and ammo.

The rich, evocative atmosphere of the world is really engaging at times, but it falls apart somewhat when you become aware of the sheer number of reused assets. Finding a new town or farm should be an exciting moment, but they're all made up of the same handful of identical houses and barns. I understand that Generation Zero was developed by a small team, but seeing the same locations copy/pasted dozens of times feels disappointingly cheap, and ultimately harms the exploration aspect of the game.

With friends you can be a lot more adventurous, tackling groups of robots head-on, creating tactics on the fly. In one session I climbed a church steeple with a sniper rifle and a friend used flares to lure enemies into my line of fire. Having people to speak to also makes those long hikes across the map more entertaining. But the game's limited content, and a general lack of interesting systems to experiment with, means even multiplayer starts to feel dull and aimless. We never managed to play for more than an hour at a time before boredom began to creep in, which is a pretty big problem.

Generation Zero isn't very good, but I do keep coming back to it. There's something about that world that makes me want to spend time there, even if all I'm doing is killing robots and picking up the same old loot from the same old houses, over and over again, forever. With updates it has the potential to mutate into something far more interesting, but for now it's an impressive setting with a slight and uninspired shooter squeezed rather clumsily into it. But still: killer robots invading Sweden. What a premise.

AMD is rolling out a new Radeon Software Adrenaline 2019 Edition driver package (version 19.3.3) that is optimized for a couple of upcoming games—Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Generation Zero.

Sekiro, the latest from Dark Souls developers From Software, lands tomorrow. We have a review in progress, and so far it is living up to From Software's legacy. Meanwhile, Generation Zero is slated to launch next week on Tuesday, March 26 (check out our preview from back in August of last year).

AMD's release notes do not provide any specific performance claims, instead only noting that the 19.3.3 driver release is optimized for both games. It also fixes a couple of issues:

• Rainbow Six Siege may experience intermittent corruption or flickering on some game textures during gameplay.
• DOTA 2 VR may experience stutter on some HMD devices when using the Vulkan API.

AMD has been on somewhat of a frenzied pace with its driver releases lately. The 19.3.3 package is the second driver update in about a week, and the third in the last month. The previous driver releases focused on The Division 2, bringing improved DirectX 12 support in Windows 10, and delivering optimizations for AMD's mobile Ryzen processors with Vega graphics. Those same benefits can be had with this latest release.

Follow this link to download AMD's newest driver.

Generation Zero, Avalanche's sandbox FPS, is breaking out of the '80s and launching next week, and you can get a taste of what you'll need to do to survive—walk around the Swedish countryside shooting robots, mostly—in the new trailer.

Come launch, you'll be able to join up to three mates in the digital Swedish countryside, now home to deadly, roving robots. There's a hint of survival, with weapons and supplies waiting to be discovered inside abandoned buildings, but it's all in an effort to get tough enough to take down the big machines. 

Samuel called it "a fun but simple co-op FPS" in his Generation Zero preview, but I found myself bouncing off the beta very quickly. I didn't bring any friends along for the ride—you can play alone if you want—and found myself quickly getting tired of hoofing it across the mostly empty countryside looking for robots to shoot. 

Comparisons have been drawn to the work of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag. Among other things, Stålenhag created Tales from the Loop, a collection of art and stories set in a alternate '80s Sweden where the mundane is juxtaposed to huge robots, monolithic factories and other sci-fi elements. It's since been turned into a tabletop RPG, and a TV show is also in the works.  

Avalanche claims it wasn't inspired by Tales from the Loop, but the broad strokes do seem similar. Generation Zero is a lot more understated, however. You'd never know it was set in the '80s from the trailers, and aside from the robots, the Swedish countryside looks pretty much how you'd expect. 

Generation Zero is due out on Steam on March 26. 

Generation Zero is an open-world co-op shooter set in a 1980s Sweden overrun by giant death robots that's being developed by the studio that did Mad Max and the Just Cause games, and if that concept doesn't have you immediately intrigued then we probably don't have anything more to talk about. But if it does, then you'll also be interested to hear that it's been slated for release on March 26. 

The game world will feature a full day/night cycle with weather effects, ballistics simulations, and "persistently simulated" enemies: If you bang one up but can't finish it off, it will remain damaged and you'll have an easier time of wrapping up your business if and when you encounter it later.  (Apparently, for all their technological advancements, Generation Zero's termination machines haven't yet figured out arc welders.) It's playable solo, or in teams of up to four in "seamless" co-op multiplayer. 

Samuel played through a brief demo of the game last August and found it "fun but simple," with "set pieces [that] can get nice and busy." There's a strong element of survival games running through it as well, as you'll have to scrounge for ammo and supplies in order to stay alive and keep up the fight.   

Generation Zero will go for $35/£30/€35, and a physical collector's edition will be available at "selected retailers." Details are up at generationzero.com. 

When Generation Zero released its gameplay trailer earlier this month, I remarked that its blend of moody landscapes and retro-futurist technology looked very similar to the work of Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag, the creator of pen and paper RPG Tales from the Loop.

As it turns out, those similarities have not gone unnoticed by Stålenhag himself, and the artist is not particularly happy with how those similarities have caused a flood of questions regarding whether he was involved with the project.

The issue has been rumbling on for several weeks, starting not long after Avalanche released its gameplay trailer for Generation Zero. In a tweet, Stålenhag said “Every time Avalanche releases a Generation Zero trailer, I have to answer questions about if I was involved or if they ever talked to me about it. It’s getting tedious.”

Stålenhag then followed this up with a thread explaining his feelings in greater detail. To be clear, it isn’t the similarities between Avalanche’s work and his own that he finds troubling. “Borrowing, referencing, and modifying other artist’s work is a very important part of art” he wrote. “Furthermore, I don’t think it should be necessary to declare your influences.”

What does annoy Stålenhag is that he already has connections with the studio. “Avalanche knows who I am. We live in the same town. The game director of the GZ follows me on Twitter. I’ve even met them and briefly worked with them, and not once did they mention they were working on a game set in the Swedish countryside in the late 1980s, featuring giant robots.”

“The minimally decent thing to do would have been to at least acknowledge the similarities when pointed out,” he added. “If acknowledging that is something you're not prepared to do—fine—but then I'm sure there are other ways to do Swedish sci-fi that doesn't look confusingly similar to the Tales From The Loop books and RPG.”

Eurogamer has since followed-up the story, speaking both to Stålenhag and Avalanche’s Emil Kraftling, the director of Generation Zero. Kraftling stated that Stålenhag “hasn't been involved with the game directly or indirectly” and that “his work has not been the motivation for—nor the inspiration behind—why we decided to create it."

In addition, Kraftling said Avalanche had been in contact with Stålenhag’s agency, and that there was an acknowledgement that no copyright infringement had been made. But Stålenhag refuted that there had been any such acknowledgement from his agency because neither himself nor they had “accused Avalanche of anything.”

It’s impossible to know for sure whether Avalanche took inspiration from Stålenhag’s work, or whether the whole thing is a freak coincidence. But Avalanche’s refusal to acknowledge any kind of similarity between Stålenhag’s work and Generation Zero does seem a stretch, especially given the existing connections between the two. According to Eurogamer, Kraftling claimed that they’ve explained the situation to journalists who have asked, but nobody had published any of those explanations. Hopefully the two sides will find a way to settle the issue soon.

If you enjoyed the scary Black Mirror episode 'Metalhead', where Maxine Peake's character is chased by a killer robot dog for ages, you'll like the basic enemy types in Avalanche's Generation Zero. They are a similar kind of mechanical enemy, if less sleek, and a lot easier to kill than they were in Netflix's anthology. And they are by far the most exciting part of this four-player co-op shooter, based on my 25-minute demo.

This FPS is set in an alternate reality '80s, which in this demo seems like a pretty unnecessary detail outside of a few wacky player cosmetics. Four young friends go exploring a Swedish archipelago, and after their boat is attacked, they're stranded in a place where all the people have vanished, and only these angry robots remain. 

This is an open world game, but it's a deliberately sparse setting. I mostly just see houses, abandoned cars and fields—there are no cities. The demo is set on one island at the bottom of the game's map, and it has me and another player (one of the developers) following clues and looking for signs of survivors. It's like if Everybody's Gone to the Rapture was set in Sweden, except instead of no one you had evil robots.  

The developers don't call them mechs, they call them 'tanks'. There's a variety of them: the aforementioned dog-like enemies, some little flying drones, these tiny things that jump at you like frogs, and a gigantic-looking mech that appears right at the close of the demo. They wouldn't reveal how many types are in the game, but aside from their visual design, there's a few things I like about them. Their appearance is flagged by red scanner lights. The game has a dynamic weather system, so in heavy rain, it's pretty spooky to see these red lights blinking in the distance. The rain apparently makes it harder for them to see the player, too.

It's more a co-op shooter than anything, but it might remind you of survival games as you'll constantly rummage through houses and empty cars looking for supplies. You'll usually be seeking out health items, ammo or flares, the latter of which can lure an enemy into a handy location so you can pick it off. 

Rifling through the remains of enemies gives you devices that you can use as EMP grenades, which scrambles them long enough so you and your buddies can land a few shots. It's not a complicated shooter based on this demo, but I like fighting enemies in open spaces with only occasional cover, using the few supplies I have to make shootouts easier on myself. 

The armoury in this demo offers a pretty basic range of pistols, machine guns, shotguns and a rocket launcher near the end, when loads of robot dogs ambush me outside a house while I pick them off from a balcony. They've simulated elements like recoil and ballistics, though strangely there doesn't seem to be a melee attack, so there's little hope of someone murdering every evil robot dog in a fistfight. There is a range of ways to upgrade your character across combat, support, survival and tech skill trees, and you can't activate every node with one character, so that'll hopefully encourage some tactical synergy with friends.

There are a few other curious elements at play here. Damage an enemy, and the game will remember how much of its health you depleted, even if you come back to the game weeks later. This doesn't mean there's a finite number of enemies in Generation Zero's world, though. While the combat seems simple and the overall feel of the game is mostly familiar—the atmosphere of these flat, quiet green spaces reminds me a little of Arma—its set pieces can get nice and busy. With three friends, I can't see how it won't be enjoyable on some level. 

Generation Zero will cost $35 at launch, which feels about right based on what I've played, and there's a beta coming down the line. I'm not convinced it'll join the growing pantheon of great first-person co-op games on PC based on my first impressions, but having enemy types that look this cool is a decent hook. 

Avalanche studios has released a meaty video showing off the systems behind its new cooperative survival game Generation Zero.

Generation Zero was announced at this year’s E3. Avalanche revealed the game is set in Sweden in 1989, and sees up to four players exploring the countryside as they attempt to survive against roving bands of robotic enemies. 

Beyond that basic outline, however, little else about the game was discussed. This video addresses that, offering three and a half minutes of in-game footage. Players arrive on the Swedish mainland to find the country almost entirely abandoned. Your initial goal is to survive long enough so you can “wage a guerrilla war against the machine invaders.”

The basic structure of Generation Zero resembles Bohemia’s DayZ, with players scrounging attractive little villages and sprawling industrial complexes for weapons and equipment. The game can be experienced solo, or with up to three other players.

Where things get more distinctive is in those robotic opponents. The video explains the machines are “persistently simulated”, so if you engage in a battle that ends with either side running away, you can re-encounter those same opponents hours or even days later, and they will “bear the scars” of that previous encounter.

You can fight the robots head on, or use stealth tactics to avoid them or lure them into environmental traps. Robots have a modular damage system too, so individual armour parts and components can be targeted and destroyed.

The video also shows off the world itself, which pretty strongly evokes the art of Swedish illustrator Simon Stålenhag. Its moody, muted-colour environments are dominated in places by anachronistic technology. It’s a dynamic world too, with changeable weather and even simulated seasons, which will apparently affect the game both for the players and the AI robots. The story of what happened to the world will be told through the environment. “The pieces of the puzzle are there for you to discover and figure out,” the video says.

The only thing I’m not sold on is the “eighties” aspect of the setting. It seems rather tacked on, and aside from some of the character’s clothing, there’s little about the video that lends Generation Zero that specific sense of time. Having said that, I've never been to Sweden in any decade, so perhaps I’m not in the best position to comment on such matters.

The combat appears to have a decent amount of heft about it, although it’s hard to tell without getting properly hands-on with the game. Generation Zero is due out net year, so hopefully it won’t be long before that happens.

Avalanche Studios, the developer of Mad Max and the Just Cause games, announced today that it's working on a new open-world shooter called Generation Zero. Set in Sweden in the 1980s (Avalanche is based in Stockholm), it's a vaguely Terminator-like tale of a world that's been taken over by machines, and humanity's efforts to survive against them. 

Generation Zero will feature "a full day/night cycle with unpredictable weather, complex AI behavior, simulated ballistics, highly realistic acoustics, and a dynamic 1980s soundtrack," which I pray will not include really bad AC/DC. Players can have at it solo or in groups of up to four, and enemies will be "persistently simulated," meaning that damage inflicted will be permanent: If you bang one up and it gets away, you'll see the effect of your efforts the next time you encounter it, no matter how far down the road it may be. 

The description is really interesting as far as it goes, but it's also really short on specifics about things like the size of the game world or how the "seamless multiplayer" will be handled. It also sounds like it may not be on the same scale as Avalanche's previous games: Generation Zero will be self-published, and executive producer Tobias Andersson described it as a "small project in the corner office." Avalanche is also currently working on Rage 2 for Bethesda. 

Generation Zero is listed on Steam with a 2019 availability date and system requirements that I would guess are subject to change between now and then: 

The Mangler: 

• OS: 64bit OS—Windows 7
• Processor: Intel i5 Quad Core
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GTX 660 / ATI HD7870—2GB VRAM
• Storage: 30 GB available space

 The Maximum Overdrive: 

• OS: 64bit OS—Windows 10
• Processor: Intel i7 Quad Core
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GTX 960 / R9 280—4GB VRAM
• Storage: 30 GB available space

(Okay, they're both bad, but Maximum Overdrive has Emilio Estevez and so that's your recommended spec.)