Many Welps

I’ll be honest with you, I have no idea what’s going on in *Generation Zero*. Part of that is my fault, I changed voice over language to Swedish for immersion (it takes place in Sweden) and then kept forgetting to read the subtitles.

From what I gathered from the opening cutscenen rouge robot war machines have been rampaging through the Swedish countryside and everyone has been evacuated. Except my character, and my three other teenage friends. No, we were on vacation in a boat in the middle of a river and had no idea what was going on until we made it back to land.

I thought that was rather silly.

Anyways, now we’re hunting down military radio relays, searching for bunkers, and shooting at every robot we come across and stripping them for parts. I’ve turned the voice over back to English so maybe next time I’ll catch up on why we’re doing all of this.

The squad jumped in to Generation Zero again this weekend. We’ve played it three times now, all to a varying degree of success. Now that we’re out of the “hitting things with bats until they blow up” phase we’re making some progress. Ok, who am I kidding? We’re still doing that but not as often.

Last time we played, SuperToast wasn’t able to join us and we made a fair bit of progress across the map. It’s a big map so we were worried he’d have to run for a while to meet up with us. This was not the case. I think the save state of the game is based on the host so Toast was able to jump to our latest Safehouse fast travel point. He also was on all the same quests we had picked up last time.

I have some gripes with this game but this is, by far, my favorite feature Our group can’t always play together so this kind of multiplayer system makes our lives easier. No one has to play on their own just to catch up. The only downside was that Toast was down a few levels from the rest of us. It didn’t seem to matter to much.

This session we decided to clear out our side missions and move forward with the main quest line. One side mission we had missed back at the beginning of the game. We had to backtrack a little ways to complete it. The other side mission had us go to a town and clear out the robots there. There not a robot in sight when we got there. I even threw a boom box down to make some noise to attract attention but nothing showed up. They must not have liked the song.

We gave up on that mission and tried to do more of the main story. After we cleared out another radio relay our next mission was to the north on the mainland. We were currently on a little strip of land at the bottom of the map. It was a hike to our next destination so we started walking.

In fact, the majority of our play time was spent walking. Like I said, it’s a very large map and the majority of it is kind of empty. There are towns to explore, sometime you find a safe house fast travel point, but sometimes you’re walking down an empty road with a few cars to loot and nothing else in site. Every once and a while we’d stumble on a pack of angry robots but a lot of the time there was just nothing.

Along the way we went robot hunting. There are several named bots across the map. Sometimes you’ll get a notification that one has become dominant in an area and they even level up if you leave them too long. Kind of wonder what they’re doing while we’re roaming around the country side. Is there some sort of internal robot war going on? Some struggle for dominance? Sounds a lot more interesting than whatever we’re suppose to be doing.

Anyways, we found the biggest robot we’d seen yet in the middle of an open field minding it’s own business. We couldn’t resist engaging it. It took a whole lot of ammo to take down but it was a fun fight. Every once and a while one of us would get hit with a barrage or rockets, get thrown, a ways, and then revive at the near by church. Giant-A632 was mean but we wore him down with our never ending respawns.

It’s hard to tell if it was worth it though. Most of the time, the big enemies drop a bunch of crafting materials and we have yet to figure out how to craft anything. The crafting materials take up a ton of space in your inventory too. Inventory is weight based, one of my least favorite inventory mechanics, and crafting materials weigh a lot. There doesn’t seem to be a way to throw them in storage either so I found myself constantly dropping 10-20 pounds of crafting mats every few fights.

Maybe we’ll find a use for them and I’ll regret it but I doubt that. They seem easy enough to come by.