I’m trying really hard to not get annoyed at this game.
At some point the Connor of the past must have pre-ordered Population Zero because I received an email containing a Steam key and it was on my “normal” email and thus not an unsolicited review copy. I don’t remember doing this and after playing a few hours of Population Zero I am disappointed in past me for dropping money on this. Whenever I did.
I don’t know what Population Zero is going for, but the more I play the more I think about All Points Bulletin. Back in 2010 I slammed APB pretty hard as a game that wanted to be the king of multiple genres and ultimately wasn’t great at any of them, and Population Zero is shaping up to be the same deal. The game wants to be an MMO, an RPG, a survival game, and a hardcore gankbox, and while the gankbox isn’t available in-game yet I question how healthy the population is going to be by the time that comes around to give it a swift kick in the nuts.
So let’s talk about my initial impressions.
1. I’m A Thirsty (And Hungry) Boy
Population Zero is shaping up to be baby’s first survival game, by which I mean the game has a thirst and hunger meter as well as a temperature gauge and various status effects that get triggered by different…triggers. One issue is that your character needs to be fed and watered constantly, like you’d think you were monitoring a Tamagotchi pet with how quickly your thirst and hunger meters fall. I carry two water flasks each of which hold ten drinks and that is usually not enough for even a short trip out for resources.
Keeping your hunger/thirst meter in a good spot takes far too much attention in the game currently.
2. The Audacity of Obscurity
Population Zero likes to make things obscure by which I mean it provides little information for where you need to go or how you need to do things. It took an exceptional amount of time for me to find stones when first starting out, either due to a lack of availability around the starting zone or because other players on the server had already picked them up.
What I did find were bigger rocks that display a “left click to attack” button when you are near them. Attacking them does nothing but have your character flail through the rock, the game not indicating that something is wrong or even that it acknowledges your efforts. In order to break the bigger rocks you need a pickaxe and to build the pickaxe you need (you guessed it) stones.
3. The Weekly Reset
Population Zero really hopes that you’ll have fun taking vague instructions and setting out to explore the world…on a time limit. Yes every week you can expect the planet to blow up and your character to die and get wiped out so you can start again and do it all over, which is exactly what you want from a game whose core gameplay loop is grinding resources so you can gradually raise your stats and grind slightly better resources.
I think if anything this is going to be the biggest hurdle to keeping up player enthusiasm for Population Zero. You can’t start a session and then lose interest otherwise you might not bother coming back for the rest of the week. The general gaming population only has so much tolerance for people wasting their time before they go off in search of more fulfilling games to play.
4. It’s Too Dense
And for the record I have no problem with a game that wants you to go out and figure things out for yourself, but Population Zero’s demand for exploration butts heads with the dense placement of enemies and your own character’s constant need for food and drink. The starting area places obnoxious amounts of creatures every fifty feet, making it impossible to run around without constantly kiting some creature.
It gets better once you have decent weapons/armor, but boy howdy is this stupidly obnoxious in the early hour of the game. You know, when you want to keep people’s attention. Also not helping the situation is that the map allows you to put down icons but…not many. It’s up to you to remember what context the three markers mean.
Oh and you apparently can’t remove the death markers from the map which makes finding the corpses you haven’t reclaimed difficult.
5. It Is Undercooked
Population Zero really needed some more time in the oven before pushing itself out to the Steam crowd. If we’ve learned one thing from the last couple of years it is that early access basically means “launched” in the eyes of the consumer. You can release with some problems, but Early Access is going to be your first impressions and for many it’s going to be the last.
Suffering from chunky combat, server issues, performance problems, and various other problems Population Zero’s biggest foe at this stage of early access is its own hubris. If they can solve the most glaring issues in short order, it might be enough to stem the bleedout that is sure to happen from this launch.
MMO Fallout 