Imagine a top-down pixel STALKER roguelite with a dash of Escape from Tarkov and that’s Zero Sievert.

The general gameplay loop is:

• Take a train to one of six randomly rearranged zones
• Loot, kill, maybe complete some radiant-style quests
• Stay alive long enough to get to the extraction point
• Offload junk back in base, buy/craft things, prep for the next scavenging run
• Repeat

That may sound a bit reductive, but honestly, that’s the game. And I can say that out of the 40 hours that I played, I had fun for almost 30 of them. Which is good! Probably. I just wish that all of the hours were fun, rather than slowly succumbing to an aching grind and increasingly vague story progression.

In the beginning, everything is dangerous and exciting. Wildlife can kill you in seconds, you have no armor to speak of, your weapons are likely terrible in comparison to Bandits or others you encounter. The first time you kill a Bandit and realize you can just take their (damaged) gun and armor though? Exhilarating. You will end up needing to loot a whole bunch of related items to earn enough cash to make repairs, but the feedback loop goes hard. Death means you lose all progress since you arrived via train, with the harder difficulty options actually resulting in your losing everything you had equipped too. Don’t worry, just losing your time is punishment enough, as there is no guarantee that the enemies you face will even have the gun you are hoping to see the next time around.

After a while though, the veneer rubs off. You cap out progression-wise, with the guns and armor you wanted, and you’re still slogging your way through story missions increasingly filled with hundreds of mutant foes. Then there are times when a late-game quest says to explore a lab, but what it meant was talk to a dude first then go to the lab, as otherwise you spent 40 minutes to accomplish nothing. And once that’s done, your next mission is to explore the last zone… but it’s not an option until it’s unlocked. Somehow. No, seriously, there was no active quest that indicated how to unlock that last zone. According to forums, you have to complete some random number of missions to finally get it to populate. Which… nah, I’m done.

Overall, I’m not mad with Zero Sievert. It was fun until it wasn’t. The v1.0 release happened just last month and it’s very clear that, like a depressingly large amount of Early Access titles, it was released more for dollar reasons than design reasons. For example, you can talk to friendly factions out in the world and you have the same Talk/Quest/etc options that you would back at base, but they never have anything to say. Although such NPCs have very short lifespans, I could see future updates fleshing out that mechanic a bit better.

In any case, that’s Zero Sievert.