About 30 seconds into the trailer for Gray Zone Warfare embedded above—which appeared at The PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted today—there's a quick break from all the tactical shooting for snack time. Or maybe I should say tactical snack time. One does need energy to shoot, tactically speaking.
This trailer was my introduction to Gray Zone Warfare—it has a Steam page and 2024 release window, but like its cold-blooded military contractors, hasn't made much noise until now.
The unmistakable Southeast Asian foliage first made me think of Crysis, but it's immediately obvious that we're looking at something simulation-y, like Arma 3 and DayZ. There are no zombies on this fictional island nation, though: All we know is that it was evacuated after "a mysterious event." You're a private military contractor sent in to figure out what's going on and, more importantly, recover neat stuff while fighting both NPCs and other players.
In that respect, Gray Zone Warfare takes after extraction shooters like Escape from Tarkov, and promises real stakes. According to the developers, "every fight could result in the loss of your hard-earned gear and progress."
Returning to my favorite subject—snacks—Gray Zone Warfare seeks to "simulate the human body" rather than representing health as a number that goes up and down, requiring players to correctly triage their own or each other's maladies in order to choose the appropriate remedy. I'm reminded of Scum, although that game arguably went too far.
The precise structure of Gray Zone Warfare isn't clear yet, but it'll be playable solo or with a squad, and the studio says that the map is a persistent, 42-square-kilometer island.
The dev also promises a storyline told through missions and NPCs, which presumably has to do with that "mysterious" happening. Was it aliens? Ghosts? Something vaguely to do with electromagnetism? Assuming Gray Zone stays on schedule, we'll be able to investigate, tactically, next year.
