Success often boils down to being in the right place at the right time, and no video game at the moment lives up to that saying more than Gray Zone Warfare ($34.99) from developer Madfinger Games. Due to a mass exodus of players from Escape From Tarkov, this Steam Early Access shooter picks up the military simulation torch. In our preview time with it, we experienced fun quests, impressive graphics, and a community eager to give the game a shot. Although some players have reported graphics card compatibility issues, Gray Zone Warfare still has the fundamentals for an exciting, engaging looter-shooter.
The Right Moment to Strike
About a week before Gray Zone Warfare's Steam Early Access launch, Escape From Tarkov's developers, BattleState Games, shot themselves squarely in the foot. By introducing a new $250 PvE mode, BattleState Games reneged on a promise to always include all future DLC in the original $140 top package purchase price. This sent the community aflame and into Madfinger Games' arms.
At first glance, it's easy to mistake Gray Zone Warfare for another Escape From Tarkov map update. The aesthetic, guns, stash management, task structure, and vendors closely resemble those in Escape From Tarkov. Dissecting ownership claims over certain gameplay mechanics is an exercise in frustration, so we won’t delve into that. That said, sometimes a fresh coat of paint is all the gaming community needs to be happy.
Gameplay: A Promising Start
Gray Zone Warfare is set in the dense jungles of Lamang Island, a stand-in for Laos. Once you’ve picked a server and chosen your preferred faction, you're loaded onto a persistent map that features three competing, 16-person teams. Once at Base Camp, your squad flies across the map, completing various quests and tasks while building a stockpile of gear, money, and weapons used to tackle increasingly difficult battles (either versus the AI or other players). You can also choose to play on strictly PvE servers, with no competing factions.
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The quests are inventive and puzzling, asking you to decipher where a particular item or stronghold is located on the map. Although the action is often “Go to X to find or fight Y,” deciphering the language of the quest text is often much of the fun itself. Clues are given, but not directly pointed to as they are in Escape From Tarkov.
Online play hit some rough spots in the first week of release, but the jitters and rubberbanding resolved as the player population steadied and more servers were spun up.
Gray Zone Warfare's gunplay is less "chunky" than Escape From Tarkov's, but that isn't a bad thing. Although Gray Zone Warfare also leans into the mil-sim genre, it's slightly more arcadey. The result is longer firefights with more dynamic movement.
Once you successfully complete the tasks, you extract via helicopter and head back to base. The extraction process is far more fluid and integrated than in Escape From Tarkov, partially due to the available technology (the latter title doesn't support persistent maps).
Madfinger pulls some of the “hard-core” out of the “hard-core looter-shooter” genre, so I suspect only the most feverish Escape From Tarkov fans will take issue with it. Instead, Gray Zone Warfare is a full-loot extraction experience that doesn’t punish you nearly as much for mistakes, encourages team coordination from day one, and looks better than almost any other game I’ve played.
What’s on display is just the beginning. The faction system doesn’t have a significant end game, and the devs stated that they have plans for world-based quests. Until then, though, much of that PvP potential is a bit lacking.
Graphics: A Feast for the Eyes
Gray Zone Warfare is an absolute buffet of bleeding-edge gaming tech. Utilizing several new Unreal 5.3 Engine systems, the multiplayer shooter accomplishes what was once thought impossible.
Southeast Asia's jungles are incredibly dense with foliage, which makes rendering them a challenge for any graphics card. Thanks to the Unreal Engine's Nanite tech, though, those levels of textural density are now a reality. It dynamically renders a game's polygon count based on distance. This differs from the LOD (level of detail) implementation that many titles rely on, which can't display close and far objects with the same fidelity as Nanite. This adds another gameplay element to Gray Zone's jungle battles; you can simply blend into the brush to escape unfavorable encounters on the fly.
The game also pulls from a deep well of innovations made in the GPU space over the past several years. These include supersampling technologies such as AMD’s FSR and Nvidia’s DLSS, as well as frame generation tech. They enable immense amounts of anti-aliasing to happen using just a percentage of the traditional hardware requirements (more on those in the next section). Combine all this tech in one pot, and you have what looks and plays like a truly next-generation PC gaming experience.
Can Your PC Run Gray Zone Warfare?
Gray Zone Warfare is based on Unreal Engine 5, which means it has some of the same compatibility issues as the Nvidia Geforce RTX 4090 cards. According to player reports, there seems to be no rhyme or reason why a 4090 might not work. The only way to know for sure is to buy the game and boot it up. Fortunately, just testing your GPU's compatibility should fit under Steam's two-hour, no-questions-asked return policy.
According to the official system requirements, your rig needs at least a four-core AMD Ryzen 5 2600 or Intel Core i5-8600 CPU; 16GB of RAM; 40GB of available storage; and Windows 10. On the GPU side, you need at least an AMD Radeon RX 5700, Intel Arc A770, or Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080.
In testing, Gray Zone Warfare ran well on a gaming PC housing an AMD Radeon RX 6800 GPU and Intel Core i5-11600K CPU (it averaged between 80 and 110 frames per second in towns and jungles). This is likely due to our setting loadout, one suggested by the developers, which used FSR 3 in Balanced Mode (with frame generation activated). If you have a lower-end card that doesn't support these features, we can't guarantee the same smooth experience.
The shooter supports mouse and keyboard controls, Steam Achievements, and Steam Cloud. Its online multiplayer mode handles up to 48 players on one map.
Why You Should Game on a PC
Verdict: Gray Zone Warfare Is Filled With Potential
Featuring engaging gameplay, a beautifully realized jungle, and hours of team-based objectives to complete, Gray Zone Warfare has a lot to offer new or returning players to the loot-extraction genre. Is it a near-direct ripoff of Escape From Tarkov's fundamentals? Yes. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. We play games to have fun, and Gray Zone Warfare is shaping up to be a vibrant entry in the growing extraction genre. Hopefully, the devs will commit to regularly improving it.
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Gray Zone Warfare is a Steam Early Access title that offers an expansive and technologically impressive take on the military simulation shooter genre.
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