Gray Zone Warfare is an open world extraction shooter that lets you step into the shoes of one of three competing PMC groups to complete missions in a massive, constantly active MMO world set on the island of Lamang. With its emphasis on completing tasks for vendors and taking part in large-scale map-wide warfare there’s, surprisingly, always something to do from the moment your boots hit the ground.
I’m a big fan of the extraction shooter genre — I’ve clocked in many painful hours with the likes of Escape from Tarkov — Gray Zone feels right at home. The map is absolutely massive, dwarfing most other games by miles with roughly 40 square miles of terrain to explore and survive in.
The best part about having such a large map (and, in my opinion, the coolest part of Gray Zone) is the helicopter rides that take you to and from the various parts of the world and can be requested in set locations all over the world. It reminds me of playing the original Modern Warfare series for the first time and starting a mission by disembarking from a helicopter.
There are various areas across the map that your helicopter team can drop you to. In the beginning you are limited to a few areas near your faction’s base but as you progress with the missions more and more landing zones become available to you meaning you don’t have to run the entire journey — which would take a crazy amount of time.
It is also good to point out that nowhere is truly safe in Gray Zone. You have a faction base which is stocked with crackshot grunts to help protect you and your fellow PMC’s but there’s nothing stopping a very dedicated team of opposition from crossing the entire map and attacking in the dead of night.
If you do happen to be caught in a hot spot with AI, enemy PMC’s and friendlies in your area it can be a bit confusing determining who is who, especially at night. There is a heavy reliance on the map which features friendlies in your local area but it appears not many others use it as I would regularly find myself getting shot by my own allies more so than enemies.
Voice chat is enabled and you can freely talk to your teammates but generally at the risk of giving your location away and around half of the players I attempted to communicate with appear to not really respond so your friendlies can also be the quickest way to earn a long walk back to your gear.
To top it off, if you are the one that instigates friendly fire or looting a dead team member you can be marked as an aggressor which prevents you from getting your gear back upon death for a limited time. I found this out the hard way after finding a corpse in the street with some higher tier equipment while unaware of this feature.
Gray Zone also has a myriad of enemies and hot spots strewn across its map, with criminal hideouts, marked points of interest and lots in between being manned entirely by NPC locals on the island of Lamang. I often felt bad about exclusively gunning down the locals, however every now and then one of them clocks me in the head from 200 metres away and starts laughing at me, so maybe it balances out.
For an extraction shooter there isn’t a major emphasis on the actual looting side of the game. I would frequently find myself running out of space on my person for new items and not finding much in the way of items to sell to the traders other than the odd valuable once in a blue moon. Here, the core focus is instead purely being on completing the missions.
One of the best features about the missions is that you can turn any number of completed ones into traders almost anywhere, and the ones that require you to drop items off can be turned in at any friendly base strewn across the map. This makes it much easier to stay out in the field for longer, rather than trudging back to base every ten minutes.
Gray Zone‘s gunplay feels a bit floaty, none of the weapons really feel like they have any weight to them and when being used can sometimes feel slightly off. It’s good to note that there are a number of animations to inspect your weapons as well to check magazines and what’s in the chamber but for things like reloading magazines it’s just instant the moment you drop bullets into them. It does feel a little inconsistent to not go either full realism or just have an ammo counter instead.
With the MMO elements, it does feel a tad impersonal. Escape from Tarkov has a number of quests, for instance, that can reward you with hideout upgrades, upgrades to your PMC, etc, but most of what you do is for the odd piece of gear and a few new landing areas. I do enjoy building up a little base and working on goals that make my gameplay better and perhaps I just haven’t found them yet but I’d like to think I’m quite far in at this point.
Gray Zone is a great MMO extraction shooter, it blends solid gameplay with an extensive map leaving you with tons of hours of gameplay and is best enjoyed with friends. It doesn’t quite have the attention to detail as other extraction shooters but is a great experience on a massive scale.
Gray Zone Warfare can be found on Steam.
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