This gritty steam shooter is your next PC gaming obsession

The bartender at the base asked me to prove myself. I need to go out and kill five wolves and five humans to show that I have what it takes to take on more difficult quests. I’m loading water, food and medical supplies. I have a rifle fitted with a scope that serves as offense, defense and reconnaissance. Outside, I talk to the conductor about going into the forest. There’s no telling what’s waiting out there.

Out in the field I can hear gunshots in the distance. But as I get closer, a howl slices through the trees. wolves. I aim, peer further ahead and spot a pack. Six of them. I take them down and step inside, not realizing how close the gunfire really was. At least three people spot me, two yelling for cover while one reloads. I dive behind a rock to check my ammo, then lean out. But it takes me too long to aim and the other people light bullets for me. I’m dying. I load back into home base, ready to analyze what gear I could take with me this time to survive such a situation, knowing that no two hunts are ever the same. I was on my way again, hopefully having learned from the mistakes of my previous life. That is zero sievertthe debut title from CABO Games and an excellent PvE extraction shooter that I’m loving my time with.

zero sievert is a top-down extraction shooter set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Featuring delightfully violent pixel graphics and procedurally generated environments, the game was released via Early Access on Steam last November. As an Early Access title, additional environments and features are expected in future updates, but the core extraction experience is already immersive. Gameplay is often slow and methodical, sometimes punctuated by sudden bursts of intense AI gunfights. The goal is to complete the challenges of maintaining satiety and hydration, as well as a little inventory tetriswhile trying to survive, complete quests and escape irradiated, dangerous areas.

zero sievert contains everything a girl could want in an extraction shooter, this time without the added stress of PvP as it is an offline-only PvE experience. But what is an extraction shooter anyway? If you are familiar with games how Escape from Tarkov, The cycle: limitor call of Duty‘s newer DMZ mode (you know, the one I can’t shut up), then you probably have a good understanding, but let’s break it down to the basics so we can get a feel for how zero sievert stacks up here.

Continue reading: Call of Duty’s year-defining new mode is everything shooters should aspire to be

Everything in an extraction shooter is built around a single game loop that asks you to go in and out of a dangerous area. zero sievert is no exception. If you hop in and out without dying, congratulations! You win. Everything you do between getting in and out depends largely on you and the shooter experience you want to have.

You can choose to spend your time fighting between entry and exit, or looting gear and equipment that will help you survive in the field. You can also search, run any number of errands, all with the loop’s requirement that you make it out alive. As I said call of Duty‘s DMZ, which has become my go-to shooter (yes, it dethroned gloriole To me. What is reality anyway??) extraction shooters like zero sievert Offer multiple gaming experiences at the same time. You can take it like a shooter at first, choosing to get into dangerous situations to test your reflexes. You can play it more like a stealth game. You can treat it like a looter shooter and prioritize your actions to get cooler and better gear. Because so many different things can happen zero sievertcan take a backseat to that primary loop of hop-on and hop-off, allowing for exploration, looting, and gunfights to carve out an emerging path of unpredictable gameplay where no two games will ever feel exactly the same.

In zero sievert, your time between entry and exit, what the game calls a “hunt,” is your own. But any journey you take to one of the game’s numerous maps will benefit from the prep work. On the Tarkov to the DMZ spectrum (Tarkov grittier and more realistic, DMZ a little more pick-up-and-play), zero sievert rests closer Tarkov: You must keep an eye on your character’s hunger and hydration levels, as well as energy and radiation levels. You also need to make sure you have the right types of ammo for your guns. Yes, you can easily end up out there without firing a single bullet. You have to bandage bleeding wounds, which takes time. The game often simulates the needs of the human body in a survival situation.

For some, this micromanagement might be too much, especially when the shooter’s difficulty is riding on it. but zero sievert eases the difficulty of this genre in one important way: you don’t lose the gear you came with when you die. Instead, what you lose is progress on quests and anything you found while hunting.

zero sievert it’s all about keeping the momentum, but over a longer period of time than a single game. You should aim to extract with better footage than you came up with, but sometimes things go downhill so quickly, with random encounters with wildlife, hostile AI humans, and treacherous environmental hazards, that sometimes it’s just a matter of gaining the momentum keep getting out alive. Disembarking means you can get back on board more informed and better equipped.

Since zero sievert Doesn’t take away your weapons and items after death, giving you a nice padded foundation to fall back on when you die. Both the survival and shooting elements of zero sievert are a real challenge. So if you can go back to base with all your stuff, you can only focus on those elements during a hunt. There isn’t any sort of reversal loop of punishment that there is with something like this Tarkov or even DMZ.

The survival elements are sort of a slow-moving train of destruction, which means if you’re careful you can get out of the way. If you don’t, you’re in for a bad time. For now, needs like hunger and hydration seem to be moving at an acceptable pace. It’s not so slow that it’s irrelevant; but on the other hand, it’s not so devastating that it feels like you’re just playing a survival game. However, I often found myself wounded, without enough health to stay alive in the field. I also made a bunch of mistakes and decided to leave too hasty before checking my inventory to make sure I could heal, eat, and drink. There is also a day and night element that you need to keep in mind. I ignored that and would sometimes step onto a map in the middle of the night with no light to see better.

But here it is zero sievert stands out for being a great extraction shooter experience: your real enemy is yourself. Yes, zero sievert has a variety of stats, weapons, and conditions for you to learn about. The outer sky will help if you don’t read the tutorial before playing (yes, you absolutely, definitely, and seriously need to read this tutorial). Outside of learning its nuances and systems, zero sievert is really a game where you are your worst nightmare based on the choices you make in a hostile environment.

Like his fellow extraction shooters, zero sievert is a tough game. But it’s very learnable and gives you the freedom to set your own pace in a way that games, which are often strictly defined by difficulty, don’t. So far each hunt has felt unique and I look forward to spending more time here in this pixelated wasteland searching for better gear and taking on the challenges of an unpredictable environment that is really just a reflection of my own patience and planning.