Project Zomboid

playing with 300 mods and with retarded friends, big fun. playing alone, depressed

Best zombie apocalypse game ive ever played. Really emphasizes that zombies arent the only major threat in a zombie apocalypse scenario. Very detailed, thought out, and immersive gameplay experience, and even better with mods!

9/10 no mods
10/10 with mods

The Indie Stone is an awesome company.

Just started playing the game
Spawned in a bar
Drank MASSIVE amounts of Alcohol
Hugged a walking dead guy
Watched my health FADE away, and I died shortly after
10/10 Game

I'll be honest, I'll probably keep playing this game until I reach a thousand hours, but that's merely because of the amount of mods I've had to download to make it fun. This game suffers from selective "realism", and the unstable build 42 further proves it. I don't want to pointlessly search and grind for basic stuff (recipes for molotovs, seriously?) just to lose hundreds of hours in an instant. The tediousness was bearable last build, but this new one just added a whole new layer to it.

I really want to recommend this game, but the vanilla gameplay quickly turns into a slow and painful grind. If you still want to buy it, just forget about playing with the default settings and change everything at your liking, or just straight up mod the f out of it. Take this review with a grain of salt, as I'm sure this game isn't for me, but keep in mind you'll be here for a long time, not for a fun time.

They're going in the wrong direction. They're falling into that trap of making things more arbitrarily difficult to try and limit veteran players from steamrolling the game, at the expense of new players and reasonable design choices. Things that didn't need to be included in the base game and could have been safely left in the realm of mods have been stuffed inside and are now bloating it, the crafting menus filled with hundreds of new, useless recipes that maybe 1% of people will actually put in the legwork to use. That and it's another episode of 'British developers think guns require special forces tier training to use.'

"It's unstable branch, let them cook!" Nah, I see what they're cooking in B42 and I know it's going to taste like shit.

this game is extremely dedicated to realism, and that is not a compliment.

It's just too complicated with no reward for learning its systems aside from surviving another boring day.

TL;DR - Give it a try. There's nothing like it.

Project Zomboid is a weird game to me.

It's a weird game in a sense that sometimes you'd launch it and you can't even spend 10-20 minutes in a run, as it just doesn't go your way or feels boring. But whenever everything clicks together, this game can easily hold you hostage for the whole day. At least that was my experience. And recently they've released B42 unstable which made things smoother and better, added animals and crafting overhaul, and it will only improve with time.

My personal experience with getting into the game is no less weird. Several years ago, when I first got the game, I've tried getting into it, but it felt too clunky and too difficult for my liking, I didn't understand some of the mechanics and I just felt lost. My approach with the game was wrong and I ended up refunding it, several times in fact. Whenever I felt like I should give it another chance, I'd buy it, boot it up and the story would repeat itself. Totaling three refunds, it wasn't until 2023 when my friend suggested we give it a try in co-op, and that's when I sunk my first ~200 hours into Zomboid.

He already had experience with the game, so I had someone to rely upon and learn the basics, the meta and the tricks, whatever we had to take care of before the water and electricity ran out. At first I didn't dare to go out exploring on my own, or fight at all. But eventually that slowly changed, run after run I became more comfortable with the mechanics, the combat, and the game easily became one of my all-time favorites. Our longest run was about ~3 months, ended by a poorly setup horde mod which the server couldn't handle.

The amount of memories we've made along the way was priceless, to say the least. It's one of those games that you write your own story in, especially if played in co-op.

I haven't seen any other game like Project Zomboid. It captures the feeling of survival during the zombie apocalypse all too well: the tension, the helplessness, the inevitable end. Sure, you can find yourself a stash of weapons and ammo early on to kill hordes. But these eventually break, ammo eventually runs out. Not to mention the seasons changing and supplies running out. How far can you get before succumbing to the Knox Virus or dying from starvation? With the base settings, all it takes is a single unlucky scratch. For the long-term survival you will have to rely upon yourself with many things.

Although I have to point out that the game does lack an end-goal apart from just staying alive for as long as you can, so you'll have to be creative about it at some point, and zombies are definitely going to be a joke after you'll learn the ropes of combat. But it will take some time before reaching these points. That being said, you can easily change sandbox settings to spice things up for your next run. And whenever the vanilla experience gets stale, there's Steam Workshop with an active modding community.

I really can't do it justice by just writing a review, as it's an experience to be had.

Sure, the UI and the server setup might seem archaic, non-intuitive and clunky (I know I hate losing my server world settings and setting everything by hand over and over again, including 200+ mods), but this game is really one of a kind and I'd highly suggest giving it a try.

This is an excellent game. Maybe the best zombie game I've ever played. Whatever your fantasy, you can tune your experience to your liking through extensive world/character customization and a robust selection of mods from the community. It is so feature-rich that the learning curve can be a little steep, but if you stick with it you will find countless hours of fun with this title.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. If this game does not win the "labor of love" award one year I am going to be pissed.

----

The development team on Project Zomboid and Project Zomboid itself has to be the most passionate team and project I've ever seen. When I saw this game for the first time back in 2020 I was like "Topdown? Yeah this is going to be garbage." Boy was I wrong.

In the past years this game has not only had me coming back for more, but it keeps amazing me with the amount of content and little details that pepper the entirety of Knox county. The Louisville (loo-eh-vull) area being my childhood home, I am incredibly happy with the amount of research the team is doing to make the setting as realistic as possible. Hot water bottles, dip (chewing tobacco), Waverly Hills Sanitorium, and EVEN the plastic bag OF bags. (Only true midwestern OG's will understand)

Build 42 (even in these early stages) is amazing, the lighting, the new basements, overhauled crafting, foraging, fishing, hunting, it is ALL wonderful.

People give the development team a hard time, say they aren't working fast enough, making a fuss over AI placeholder loading screens. To that I say who cares, it takes time to deliver a quality product!

The development team over The Indie Stone are insanely passionate, something the most well known game studios in the industry today are missing. It clearly shows, too. With the gaming industry being pumped full of reused first-person-shooter slop every half year with the same ideas, it's great to see a studio that really wants to make a unique experience.

Keep kicking ass, you guys are doing great, and this game of yours is great too!

Very grind esc game i would reccomend though its fun with friends or just to waste time

I jumped out the 2nd story window and fractured my leg, I survived for 2 days after that.
Good game 👍

Wise choice reading this game reviews before buying, bro.

It's literally the best zombie survival game. Even the graphics is not the best, Isometric camera and a lot of people might not like it, but if you don't care about those I would definitely recommend this game. It's definitely worth your 20bucks, With that money it will gives you a fun times even if you bored this game's community is insane. There are a lot of mods out there, weapons, vehicles, clothes, hairs, maps, qols and drugs (literally breaking bad). The gameplay is realistic, take the sims 1 as example I guess?? But The sims that had zombies, do anything to live, find foods and waters, medicines and a place to live. But yeah this game doesn't have no clear goals, you set for yourself and you might find type of game boring? You could try to survive for a month, a year? or build a cool house? max out skills? I don't know man just make sure to make your character 'Live Happily' in this apocalypse world.

It would be more fun if you have a friends to play with, I once found a meth and kept it in the car the next moment I come back to the car, there is my friend's dead body laying. Lol.

Overall I recommend this game also the development is quite slow since it being develop by few people (you can tell from the release date 2013 and still being in early access) It's a passion project, the devs definitely love this game so as does the community. So give them time.

This game helped cure my fear of my wife leaving me by making it a reality, everytime I play this game she gets upset bc I focus too much and she finally decided to leave me after 12 years taking all 3 of our kids with her. 10/10 would recommend

12 and a half years later and it's still bad. Glitches everywhere, clipping through ceilings after vaulting out of windows falling into hordes of zombies on the floor below. Zombies biting you through walls or around corners, a zombie respawn rate that essentially means zombies will appear ten feet behind you after you just cleared out an entire town a day or even hours before.
And don't even get me started on how animals textures can clip through walls. Being technically inside a house, but only being able to be interacted with from the outside of the house. Until they decide to run back into the center of the house while you are on the outside. Only for them to run back and clip into the wall again when you try and grab them, continuing the annoying vicious cycle until a zombie sneaks up on you and kills you while dealing with this.

And on top of all of that it's perma-death with no backup save feature whatsoever, so you can lose a great character to a glitch that is completely out of your control.

And speaking of controls, they are still infuriating even after a decade of development. Probably one of the worst controlling games I've played that's considered a "modern game". You slide everywhere and do not move like a normal human even while playing on controller. Which wouldn't be a problem if the game didn't regularly require precise movement to evade zombies.

I wanted this to be a good game after a decade, I really did, but it's not something I can take seriously. If they are expecting me to put 20+ hours into a character just to have him die due to a glitch these guys somehow missed for over a 10 years of development time. They obviously don't care about their hardcore fandom and player base even though they claim to.

If you want to play a game like this, there are better options that won't waste your time or screw over your entire save with irreversible changes. Games such as. Dysmantle, Kenshi, 7 Days To Die (the 16.4) version is the best in my opinion. Zero Sievert, and Unturned which is free. Just to name a few.

Don't waste your time or your money on this. And don't think it will be better in ten years either. Because it hasn't noticeably improved since I played it back in 2014.

little piss baby devs that have been throwing temper tantrums since the games inception. Don't buy this if things like that put a sour taste in your mouth, if it doesn't, be my guest, it's not like the game is bad.

While this game is a worth while experience, the actual core game-play loop is very boring often leading to what now? moments. Skills in the game are unnecessarily grinds that don't provide remotely enough of a reason to level beyond a 6-7 when all the time can taken away in seconds.

Spawned in, speed walked around the city, felt hungry, ate rotten rat of a garbage can. Died. 10/10

Get a weapon, kill a zombie, loot the zombie, die because there is another zombie coming from behind and u cant see him because of the panels that look like windows 7 interface.

I'm aware this game is in early access, so I'm making this review negative only to highlight the issue. If it gets resolved, I'll write a proper one.

I literally can't play the game because I have a 4K monitor. There are some very tricky solutions I found online, but I can't complete them due to my lack of technical skills. The game allows you to choose 2K or even 4K resolutions, but everything on the screen shrinks to an unviewable size.

I know how good the gameplay is, I've watched hours of streams of this game, but I can't try it myself.

shot my friend with a shotgun, pulled the bullet out of his arm, stitched his wound and fed him antibiotics. perfect game for using your friends to farm first aid xp, although im sure i could have picked less dangerous ways to do that.
bah.

same friend also ran around without shoes and got glass in his feet. had to pull out the glass and stitch his wounds. he still didnt have shoes so when he moved he got more glass in his feet and destroyed his stitches. this process repeated five times before i had to loot shoes off a zombie.
10/10

I just started playing for the first time when build 42 was released. Almost all of my deaths are the result of having to hold down right click to melee, which usually results in the menu popping up. The menu has cause basically all my combat deaths.... I can't understand why the default is set like this. I'll have to figure out another way to bring up the combat controls. Extremely frustrating.

The replay value is almost non-exsistent. With no story, or a way to see an end to the gameplay, it is very hard to keep coming back to this game after living for a few days, then dying because the zombies can somehow hear me in a house from blocks away. It is amazing how well the zombies hear me. I even crawl and only use melee weapons, then all of a sudden, I am surrounded.

The gun aiming sites are a bit confusing to use.

I can see how this game is so popular. But if people don't actually voice their problems with it, this game won't get any better.

I will update this as I play, but I am enjoying it overall.

me morí y me transforme en un zombi, empeze otra partida, y me encontre a mi version zombi y me maté

O meu PC não roda de jeito nenhum e além disso ele nem abre então pra mim evitar desperdício eu jogo pelo telefone pelo Geforce Now mais os controles são confusos e a tela do telefone buga é foda

Very good and fun game. I found this game through my favorite YouTuber, Call Me Kevin, and ngl the controls were kinda hard for me to learn. But its also just hard for me to learn anything, so I'm not sure if that would actually mean anything to anyone. Anyways, I really recommend playing this game and probably start with a customized sandbox.

I took a year long break from this only to come back to hearing that melee (ya know, hitting zombies with blunt objects; the thing you do for a majority of play time) being hit with the Muscle Fatigue nerf, the creation skills being blasted to the stone age because reverse engineering not being considered a legitimate form of knowledge gathering and the devs wanting you to craft an actual ton of objects for you to get a single level up, they removed the sims 1+2 inspired pixel art moodlets for Ultra HD high quality ones that look like NSFW parodies of themselves, and a controversy about AI art where even the most generous take by ThatGuyPredz of "don't just jump to conclusions" got his account removed and him being banned from the companies' Slack thing.

This sounds like 4E D&D, Warcraft 3 Reforged, Fallout 76, and a lot of other things that I've heard horror stories of. Each alone would be a small controversy, this all happening within the same build number in the span of a few days ago reads like a giant red flag that things are going downhill and The Indie Stone may be more interested in making the racoon burger joint a lore thing than actually fixing any of these problems.
I cannot in good faith let this sit in my steam account without a thumbs down for these events.

I died by avenging my previous characters, getting bit, and drinking till I blacked out and died in a laundromat

uh oh, unhinged rant about my favorite game incoming.

Lowkey b42 kinda sucks

More importance on skillbooks, while also adding far too many filler books, making it extremely hard to find the book you need. (Was already the case in b41, but is compounded even further in b42.)

Far too grindy when a single scratch has the potential to kill your character, especially when the dreaded ghost bite is still a thing. WHY are ghost bites still a thing two years after the last update?

Crafting is now obtuse and hard to understand, why do I need a surface such as a table to repair my spiked baseball bat?

The new fishing system is alright, but at higher levels you end up catching fish that are literally impossible to carry with how heavy they are. Not that bad as you can simply filet the fish on the spot, but it just goes to show the actual quality of this update after all this time of cooking.

Basements are one of the few amazing changes, truly great work on that devs.

The new aiming system is glitchy, but amazing. When it's patched it will be great, when it works, it feels amazing to use.

The optimizations are good in theory, however, there's an unintended consequence the developers have failed to mention once, lower end PCs got incredibly shafted. Playing on my laptop which is slightly higher specs than recommended from the store page ends up in an unplayable experience, my main desktop PC is much higher specs than that and still takes upwards of twenty to thirty minutes of playtime before the stuttering from what I assume is caching shaders stops.. Hopefully the devs end up raising the system requirements on the store page, because as it stands now, it's pretty much false advertisement.

Muscle strain is completely over tuned at the moment, while I enjoy the concept of muscle strain, it needs to be nerfed. I'm fully aware sandbox settings exist, but that doesn't help balance. Having the player balance the game themselves isn't a solution to bad balance.

These past two years the developers have been teasing this update, talking about how many more developers they've hired and how much progress they've made, but it feels more like two steps forward three steps back. it's hard to not ask ourselves WHY they've chosen to release an admittedly massive update instead of smaller updates that could be fine tuned quicker and released much faster?
(But Dee! Zomboid has always famously had a slow development cycle!)
This is true, when they didn't have a much larger studio it was common for updates to take years to cook, however, remember build 41? While the animation update was still being teased, we got the vehicles update. We got a completely seperate mechanic while still teasing the new ones that still needed time being cooked.
If this were new zomboid, the devs would have chosen to not release vehicles until the animation update was complete, possibly leaving in multiple game breaking bugs with specifically vehicles that would have to be ironed out as time went on. This is what's going on with build 42 right now, almost every single aspect of this update needs polish, which would take much more time than if they simply released smaller updates.

If only we had gotten the fishing update as it's own separate update.
If only we had gotten animals as their own separate update.
If only we had gotten this new aiming system as it's own separate update.

Why did they release it like this? There's only one answer I can personally think of.

Greed.

Build 41 got them enough money to essentially quadruple their studio size, build 41 was massive and it made the devs see that releasing giant updates that takes multiple years to create will always result in a nice paycheck, and it did for build 42, but nowhere near as much as build 41. So instead of letting the community play around with the new moodles that most of the playerbase despises about a year ago when they were finished, we get them now, in an overwhelmingly mid update.

The original vision for the art style of zomboid is dead, the new moodles look awful, doors being animated feels pretty uncanny valley when the rest of the world is in 2d, and the brand new player voices are legit awful. All of this adds up to an experience that is distinctly no longer zomboid.

This is completely ignoring the alleged use of AI art in their loading screens, those were removed, I would like to say it's not a big deal, except for one developers response to it.
Lemmy.

Lemmy has always been a strange one in our community, known for having breakdowns online over being 'bullied' and threatening to sell the game off to a bigger company because he doesn't like the mean words being thrown his way. To put it bluntly, he's a child. I pray for the day TiS decides to sell zomboid off to a large company, maybe then the awful company management of TiS will stop getting in the way of development.

He responded to the allegations of AI art by pretty much brushing it off, saying how it wasn't TiS's fault that they used potential AI art, how it would be the artists fault. That's just not true, it's YOUR game. Zomboid in of itself is an art piece, and if your company is getting too large to the point where something like an AI generated loading screen is getting passed down into the final version of your most anticipated update ever there's something massively wrong with how the company is being ran.


As it stands now, I cannot in good faith recommend Zomboid. I will edit this review if the situation changes, but for now, simply keep a distant eye on this game.

Bought this game because one of my pals recommended it and thought why not...

Played for probably 3 hours and had some of the funniest, scariest and some of the most intense moments I've ever had in gaming, remember when my pal got bitten for the first time, I sat with him in the shower until he turned, was probably the funniest and most heartbreaking thing to watch your mate just turn into a nightmare right infront of you and then having to beat his zombie body to death...

This game in unlike any survival zombie game out there, it captures exactly what it would be like to live in a zombie apocalypse and takes away the "superhuman" abilities you have in other zombie titles...
You get bitten it's game over, you get scratched there's a chance you'll become infected, there's no cure just like how it would be irl, it makes every zombie/horde encounter that more intense due to the fact you can lose everything in an instant.

Don't get me started on mods, the modding community for this game is insane, there's a mod for pretty much anything you can think of.

10/10 second best zombie game I've ever played (if you can Last of Us as a Zombie game)

erm i've played this for 15 hours and let me say the 15 hours i've played this game were horrible. within 40 minutes of installing my grandmother was shot dead by "the zomboid". "the spiffo".

who up projecting they zomboid

An incredible zombie survival game that will only get better and more fleshed out as they update.

I downloaded this game 2-3 days ago and im addicted. The gameplay, the atmosphere the game mechanics, everything is perfect. If you're looking for a zombie survival game, i highly recommend you this!

10/10

I have played alot of games especially zombie/survival games but this masterpiece is by far the greatest zombie survival game i've ever played. It's such a shame it took me this long to discover it.

The most hyper-realistic zombie game ive ever played. If your not a graphics person and prefer gameplay experience over a pretty, realistic zombie game this is for you. Cant say enough good things about these devs.

Criticism of the latest update apart (which i do have a lot of), I'm simply leaving this negative review based on how badly the devs seem to be at handling any sort of criticism, even the most mild of it, you lead you to get banned on any official platform (even if the said criticism was done somewhere else).

As for an actual review I will just say one thing: they are making the game go down a terrible path for the sake of unrealistic realism, meaning realism that only fucks the player, but never that would be in their favor. That besides all the other systems, old and new, that are also very dumb, like your gun DEALING LESS DAMAGE when you have any sort of injury in your arm. How very realistic.

cool indie game with dedicated, funny ass devs

right from the tutorial, project zomboid immediately throws you into situations and doesn't expect you to get out of them. it's as the trailer says: you will die, and you will learn from it. then you will die again. you will probably do that a few times, then try out various sandbox options and mods until you find the best mode for you, be it a challenge mode something easier, or multiplayer. it has something for everyone. the bulk of my playtime is in multiplayer RP servers, and for what it's worth it's very easy to host multiplayer games.

this game will without a doubt be easier to recommend when its latest build goes onto the main branch, but if you're determined to wait you will be waiting a while. the latest build (B42) is playable through beta branches and if you're interested i recommend just buying it when you want to play or when it's on sale. in my opinion, you can pretty reliably tell whether it will be worth it for you if you watch let's plays.

and good news: they fixed the chickenpocalypse.

Without a shadow of doubt, B42 is certaintly the greatest update ever for PZ. The added difficulty, and expanded realism is outstanding. This is the best zombie game out there.

Who knew menu navigation could be so much fun?! A great game that really has it all. So much customization you can play any way you want - just have fun! The game also has a brilliant modding community.

At face value the average person see's another Zombie Survival game. This is beyond that. And has brought the genre back with reality, and how the average person does not prolong death. A stark realization, and blindside.

The age old "I'd survive" argument can finally be laid to rest. as we now have the perfect, humbling experience that anyone can get their hands on.

Thank you Indie Stone for making my favorite monster, A monster again.

Wanted to buy the game for a friend or two but the happpenings around the unstable release made me raise an eyebrow.

I hate being criticized on things I worked on for a good while, but this is a bit much.
Also AI art.

Something malicious is brewing.

I'm not sure I could recommend a game where the developer doesn't allow comments on updates when it has been in development for a decade.
Overall it's an interesting game but playing it without custom settings is peak masocism.
Maybe wait untill it's finished before taking the leap because as others have pointed out the devs have previously threatened to sell the game because they were unhappy with the community.

Found lots of generators, but can't find the magazine to learn how to operate them. Maybe the guy in the helicopter can help.

The core gameplay loop of Project Zomboid currently rests upon 2 pillars:

1) I am a human being. This means that our human character ingame must drink, eat, sleep. There must be clothing, shelter for them. But food is limited and it can go bad, water and electricity will shut off, clothes degrade. Such needs are satisfied by the game's exploration and looting, gathering, foraging, fishing, building, etc.

2) I am in a zombie apocalypse. This means that, as a human, zombies will try to eat the playable character. The character must gather weapons and fight, acquire protective gear, stealth around the zombies, all of them in order to survive the horde.

These 2 pillars work well together, because in order to gather the resources to satisfy the human needs, one needs to explore and gather, but such actions puts one in confrontation with the zombies. And in order to handle the zombies, one's character must be well of in terms of their need, least they succumb to the horde. Its a catch 22 of game development.

The issue is that this formula quickly becomes obsolete. As you acquire skills and material in the game and you build up your base, the need to engage within this cycle becomes non existent. After a player gets familiar with the game and its controls, there is nothing stopping them other than the new artificial "muscle strain" mechanic from quickly making sure that both pillars are finished within a couple of weeks of game time, at which point the game just stops dead in its tracks and you are forced to answer the question "what now?".

Here is something that might upset the playerbase. Project zomboid is a boring game, the combat is not interesting, its just hold mouse 2 while pressing mouse one on heads, the exploration is repetitive, finding similar stuff continuously. And that is good, realism is one of the strong points of this game, and I would not want that changed. What makes this sequence of events interesting is the whole "human in a zombie apocalypse" scenario.

The main character of the game is not the actual living human in the game, its their story. The story is the main character, and Project zomboid is both a scene and a set of tool for the player to tell that story. And all of this is competently made, but this is a story that stops being interesting after Act 1, after the human character has established a foothold in an area and has gathered the necessary skill and materials for survival. There is still more to do in the game of course, but those things are in no way connected to the story.

Imagine a zombie movie in which a survivor has successfully established a base in a small town with enough food and water for a long while, and access to more if needed. Plenty of tools and material, skill are there and only improving. All is well, they have survived and will do so for a long time. Then after all of their struggles they randomly pack a car with supplies and drive off into the big city and get killed. And the only reason that anyone could have come up with for that action is "Just because".

This is what i imagine the story of the average player is like. After learning the game and getting into the gameplay loop, your are hit with the brick wall that is the lack of more gameplay loop. You can continue the loop, gathering more material, killing more zombies, building more base. Or you can do something else that is completely detached from the story building up until then because you got bored of the gameplay loop, and the only story reason for you to do so is "just because".

Why would you bother learning to fish/forage/farm when there is plenty of food in cans everywhere in the city? Just because. Why would you build your own base when there are plenty of good houses all around? Just because. Why would i care about the build 42 crafting of tools from scratch when there is a perfectly good melee weapon in my neighbors house? Just because.

And yes, you can change the setting in order to reduce the amount of skill and material that you can collect, but that merely delays the inevitable end of the gameplay loop, it does not add anything to it, it makes it even worse by the diminishing returns your actions will have.

Build 42 has brought the playerbase and substantial improvement in the technical aspects of the game, i love the new visual aspect of the game, the new music, sounds, lights. All of that is good and well, but all of the content added for the gameplay is purely more "just because". Do i think its interesting that i can make my own weapons and armor from scratch? Yeah. Do i think its relevant to the game that i play? Will i actually bother to go through the elaborate crafting for a piece of metal that is marginally better at killing zombies? No.

The only solution for this problem is the third pillar of the game, that is currently not even in the game, human NPCs.

3) I am a human, among other humans. That means that that i interact with other humans, that they, like me, have needs and desires, and are also in the zombie apocalypse trying to survive.

I can see a version of Project zomboid that instead of hitting a stone wall after basic skill and material acquisition, NPCs will come in the story to shake things up. Suddenly there is competition for those precious resources, the zombies will have another target other than the player. Will we compete, fight, befriend the NPCs? Will we make our own group or be alone? Will our group go into conflict with others? Will there be politics, trade between the communities that arise after the dust settles?

NPCs will transform so many of the games "Just Because" into pieces of story with actual reason and significance. If implemented correctly, they will continue the game's gameplay loop beyond the first stage of the game and, hopefully, in its totality. Project zomboid will stop being a "last person on earth" game and will become the "life and death of a survivor of a zombie apocalypse" game that it always wanted to be.

There is just one last problem, a closing thought. This game has been in development since 2011, was released in 2013. Build 41 was released in beta form in 2019, stable in 2021. Now its the end of 2024 and build 42 unstable has been released. Human NPCs will first be added in a basic form in build 43, and fully developed only in build 47.

My only hope is that i will live long enough to actually play that game that has been promised.

If you like simulation games like SIMS, Stardew, Valheim, etc, and you love zombies, you'll love this simulation survival. The in-depth tasks it takes to actually survive and prosper always blows my mind. Love that about this game, and I'm looking forward to learning all about Build 42 like I did with its predecessor.

The developer is slow in bringing out updates for it but the game already has enough content to be worth its price in my opinion. Though it is not a very casual game and requires some effort at times that a casual gamer might find boring. I suggest if you read this review by the time i posted it and you aren't sure if you want to buy it, look back in a couple years once its completed or has had a couple big updates and see if it is more fun for you.

I was having higher expectations for B42. The game looks much better overall, which isn't bad. Also basements are cool. But the core game itself hasn't changed, only marginally (muscle fatigue tweak is the main thing I felt). Also the game looks a bit blurry now? Like TAA antialiasing was enabled by default or something. I haven't seen any options to turn it off. Hurts to give a negative review but it's how I feel about this update. There's no reason for me to pick up this game once again.

Sadly, the developers have begun to use AI "art".

This is how creative integrity died.

Project Zomboid is a masterpiece of realistic, apocalyptic survival. It is challenging, thoughtful, lonely, immersive, and rewarding as hell. I play it as a roguelike (new save after each death), and it is the best zombie survival experience hands down. Once you've climbed the steep learning curve, it is a goldmine of quality game design that has been lovingly evolved for years.

It's a game that has persistently been updated for over a decade. And while the updates often take years to materialize, each major build is like playing a sequel. The Indie Stone deserves endless goodwill for constantly supporting this single game, listing it under $20 with frequent sales, welcoming the modding community (even hiring modders as developers), and implementing community feedback.

If you vibe with the control scheme and embrace the difficulty, it is the BEST zombie survival experience out there.

This is a the best piece of zombie media... it makes you feel like a survivor 10/10... and after every update it gets better and better