7 Days to Die

Was a great game during its many alpha stages and has come a long way with performance and content.
But the game since going into 1.0 has suffered with an identity crisis between being an open ended survival game like it used to be and a linear RPG in the sense that you are expected to play how the devs want you to play instead of playing how you would like.

after more than 10 years of development we have reached a 2.0 version that is still full of glitches and the game consistently gets worse with every major update. your servers will not continue to work because every 3 months there is an update that breaks your server and you need to start over again.

Game with no added value since 2018.

After a seemingly endless period of waiting, A17 finally dropped out. Only to announce the upcoming fall of its past glory. Since then nothing major has changed, instead of the so long awaited bandits we were being buttered up with tons of concept art images showing different stages of bandits or dogs as future available player companion. Years have passed and none of this made it to the game. This was just a dirty put-on to keep our attention and hype for this game.

The required skill to implement those features that this developer team obviously lacks wouldnt be much of an issue if they did not on the other hand messed the key and old standing features that were core of the game. Without using common sense, the loot system has been with no doubts raped, glass jars (water) system has been removed without any contemplation, random world generation (RWG) has been totally annihilated (instead of dynamic, diverse and large maps (A16) we now have "minecraft flat" maps with mountains and hills glued to the world as premade add-ons).

What we see instead is infinite favouring of blind Twitch integration mechanics, which are used as a substitutive topic to divert the attention from the long awaited crucial features. Noone literally gives a single damn about Twitch and its game integration.

This game needs real updates with CONTENT, not half-baked unfinished and buggy updates with little to no content, which are explored in matter of minutes (or in better case, in matter of couple hours).

This game is old but fun with friends. However it is VERY over priced right now, $45 is crazy. I bought it like 3 years ago for like $6 if I remember right. Crazy overpriced that's why I do not recommend. And since you'd likely play with friends it's an insane price.

My husband suggested this when we were looking for something to play. We have a ROG Ally, a Lenovo Legion Go Pro, and a Lenovo Legion laptop. The game runs well on all our PC's. My husband loves fighting the zombies, doing missions, and fighting the hordes. I usually play city management, life simulators, crafting games, and lots of RPGs/survival horrors. This game is perfect! It's like Minecraft had a science baby with Skyrim and Resident Evil. Lots of POIs, loot (so lots of exploring), and little side quests here and there. With each level, we get faced with more and more difficult zombies/monsters. The game keeps us on our toes, and horde night (every seventh day) is always suspenseful and fun. It's also a pleasure when you come across a game with devoted developers constantly refreshing their product. Seriously, I can't believe this game is 10 years old. 10/10 experience.

While you can play as a single player I have found playing with friends is the best option. Not only does it make Horde nights actually bearable, the entire comradery that you have to have to survive is enjoyable.

if you are looking for a game that recalls the things you have left behind for safe keeping then this isn't it. I cant count how many times its lost all my objects even while i'm playing the game. its garbage. maybe a 3 out of ten. the game play is all right although over the time i have played it i have lost at least 2.6 million in money along with countless things i have gathered. if you like to continually get the things you should have then its great for you. I was always hoping they would fix those glitches by now. nothing ever happened.

Zombie games scare the heck out of me!! But 7 days is my absolute favorite crafting survival game and the zombies just make it a lot more exciting. Very very fun to play with friends especially for some of the more intense quests/adventures.

The skill/book system was enough to ruin the game for me. It's trash. They made the entire character progression rely on a loot system that cannot be tweaked. The developers apparently think it's fun to search for books??? Say you max out your book skill, you will still find tons of the same books. They don't sell for much, nor do they give noticeable improvement to XP. It's just a goofy system, that changeed the game from active skill gain to looting..... I hate what you have done to 7DtD.

its a good game but the lockpicking is so bad it makes me want to uninstall, the rng breaks lockpicks right at one second left and it resets it to 3 or 4 seconds so most of the good loot you cant access making the game stupid and annoying.

The devs got tired of making a survival sandbox game and instead of making a new game from scratch, they decided to absolutely destroy their already half-successful survival game. By slowly taking away survival features, contorting it update by update slowly pulling it apart, taking away features and over-simplifying mechanics they remove any resemblance of realistic sandbox survival, replacing it with arcadey RPG elements. Below is a relatively short list of ways the game has completely dissolved from what it once was

-You can no longer fill jars with water to boil, you have to "quest" in order to obtain the materials for a 'dew collecter' which is the only way to collect water from nature.
-You no longer gain skills in the relevant category (mining = mining xp), instead like in an rpg, you can freely choose to use your skill points however you wish. Bashing zombies means you'll be a world renown chef in no time!
-You now have to clear POI's aka Dungeons to get anywhere in the game, oh and just to be sure it's a REAL RPG, it even has a difficulty meter neatly placed on top of your screen, giving you META knowledge on whether or not it's too difficult for you. This also gives the player a very nice RPG way of knowing if the POI is even worth their time, as the difficulty scales loot.
-You also HAVE to complete quests now, that is if you want to get anywhere in the game. Yes, the hallmark of the RPG, questing... unless you actively quest for the traders, you'll be stunted in your progress and will have a hard time getting anywhere. Oh, and when you're done you'll be rewarded with 'gold', 'skill books' and 'loot'. God I love having to run errands in my survival game, it really immerses you in that zombie apocalypse vibe.
-You'll now need to complete many of these quests, because the only way to reliably gain skill books (which is the only real way to unlock new crafting recipes for tools and equipment) is by questing for them, thus soft-locking progression behind the questing system.
-You liked being able to customise your character to your liking with a broad range of gear? Well that's too bad, because this game wants to be an RPG, so now you only get 4 slots where you can put VERY specific pre-made outfits, and there will be no customisation, because 'outfits' give buffs when you have the entire set, again, soft-locking character customisation.
-Did somebody say RPG? Well, where are the potions? Oh there they are, disguised as 'candies'. They act exactly like potions, granting the player magical powers like increased resource gain, experience and loot boosts. You can buy these potions from the trader, where they'll be waiting neatly packaged in a vending machine, straight from the post-apocalypse candy factory.
-And together with this it's also been decided that every dungeon should have a pre-determined path. Instead of looking through houses, scavenging every room and looking for hidden items, the game should feel like an RPG, and everyone knows that a dungeon needs a clear path to follow and a nice big loot room at the end, so that's what they did. Houses and other POI's now have a neatly placed hole in the wall or open door etc. that holds your hand as you traverse through the dungeon, leading you to the price at the end of it, all without having to smash a single door and all stacked together so that there's no mistaking it.

Again, this is just what popped up in my head, there's loads of other changes that either made the game a horrible sandbox survival game, or helped turn it into an RPG. I feel sad, this game used to be amazing, now you're forced to play the game how the devs want you to play it. I mean they even removed the Sandbox tag on Steam

Shame on you Fun Pimps

The concept is that at some point, there was a serious disaster. Now, every 7 days the moon turns red and hordes of zombies come to try to kill you. Further, zombies are everywhere, usually moving slower during the day and faster at night. They hunt you if you get close enough. Otherwise the world is our world with the standard day night cycles, nature etc… Well, at least that was the original concept of the game..

It used to be a logical open world that was tough to survive in but the physics and requirements for survival and crafting was the same as IRL. You could learn the basics by doing and better stuff by finding specialist books that covered that subject. Sadly, that is not the case anymore. Now you have to find magazines, lots of magazines.

You used to be able to make weapons, progressing in a logical way from stone clubs and stick bows and arrows and spears to a pipe blunderbuss with pebbles for ammo to a single shot pipe shotgun with real shot to pipe revolvers to pipe machine guns with very small mags to better versions of each until you got up to m60’s and sniper rifles and compound bows. Now, well now you can make a pipe machine gun, with that complicated machine gun firing mechanic on day one, no magazines required. But don’t worry you won’t be able to cook anything and grass clothing is all you can make too. How does that make sense?

You used to be able to make armor pieces of different types and jumble them together to get the type of armor coverage and movement you wanted. The armor you made even looked like you had patched stuff together to make them. Now you have “Sets”. Each piece gives you some magical special ability and if you have the whole set there are magical set abilities. They don’t say it’s magical but in practice it clearly is. I mean really?

There was a logical progression of building from simple wood to reinforced wood to stone to reinforced stone to cement to rebar reinforced cement to steel. Not so much now.

Crafting was first do it to learn it, then became perk based (experience let you learn stuff), and now became you don’t know jack and can’t learn jack and thus can’t craft jack, (or cook jack), UNLESS you find enough magazines on the subject. Specialist books do still exist to provide extra’s. But wait… you can still make that pipe machine gun right off the bat, and you can still build wood buildings…… No magazines required. This makes sense why?

The natural world used to follow the rules of nature. That is, you could melt and then boil snow to make potable water; you could gather water from streams and lakes to boil so you could drink it safely; you could even drink water from the lakes or streams in a pinch and hope you didn’t get sick. You could find wild berries, (Snow berries), in abundance in the snow biome to survive on for a bit. Yes, there was a small chance they would make you sick too but that was usually better than starving. Now, well now you can’t melt snow nor gather water from lakes or streams. The only way to get water is via a Dew Collector.. yeah. Hope you find those magazines you need fast so you can figure out how to build it. Wonder what wildlife uses? Well, you could always buy water from a vending machine or trader. Oh yes, you can also hope to find something to drink in a zombie infested house or building…


Zombies. Zombies used to behave logically for a zombie. They would wonder around until they spotted someone and then they’d try to go eat that someone. Sometimes they would try to eat the wildlife and/or fight wildlife. They could fall “asleep” or comatose in buildings and could wake up if disturbed. During a blood moon, they would become stronger and crazed and KNEW where you were and came in a horde to get you. Now, well it’s a bit different. Now zombies wall themselves into walls, ceilings, you name it and wait for you. Now, they can appear, literally out of thin air if you step on the software coded “trigger” block or area. Stealth or no stealth, that trigger block still creates the zombies and they will all agro on you.

Quests: At first, quests didn’t even exist. Now, well now they are your life blood. They are how you reset buildings you already cleared of zombies and loot. They are how you get that money you need to buy those special books you can’t find, from the trader or those crafting centers (Forge, cement mixer, etc), you haven’t found the magazines for yet. What about a nice gun or extra ammo or, early on, the basics.. Food and water. Doesn’t feel so much like an open survival world when you have to go to a quest provider all the time. BTW, the quests are limited in that they repeat. You end up doing the same quest at the same buildings, over and over and over and…

Traders: It used to be a specific trader could be in a forest zone in one area and a desert in another etc. They were not tied to a specific biome. Now they are and that, my friends, is simply sad. I say this because the traders are not generic, they have their own personalities and to some extent specialties. So now you are Forced to go to a specific biome to find that trader you like. They simply won’t exist in any of the other biomes.

Story line: The game starts out with an interesting storyline beginning teaser, which is also alluded to by at least one of the traders in one of their statements to you. Yet, as of this writing, April 2025, no story has emerged. This is sad to me as it seems such a story could be easily put together, especially with the quest system in place.

Lastly, even after all these years in development, the basic block on block building problem remains. The ground blocks have a different orientation than the above ground building blocks. They don’t mesh smoothly. So, when you are trying to build say a driveway, you end up with an entry slope block that does not smoothly go to the ground of the next block. Rather, there is either a ledge or a deep crack between the blocks that bikes and motorcycles usually can’t cross and other wheeled vehicles may or may not cross with a significant bump and resulting vehicle damage.

For me, this has been a sad downhill ride. I was so excited at the beginning, everything was logical to me and natural. Now it’s all contrived and not at all realistic in the game play on even the basics.

The devs have no idea what they want to do with a game.

It went from an Open Sandbox Survival game to an RPG Sandbox Survival game where your options to approach things have been severely reduced and u won't get better at X thing by doing it. Instead u must shoot zombies & do Quests so you can get better at Cutting Trees or Crafting better gear

You MUST also know what you're doing, by watching some guides & videos. U must choose a class, which also limits what weapons u can use properly. U want to use clubs & Shotguns? Go for Strength, but wait... This Rifle & SMG are really good, also this pistol is quite nice... Now you must spec into Rifles, SMG & Pistols which all have different trees & point requirements in their respective category... But damn, I also need to spec into faster digging, faster mining, electricity, crafting, workbenches, vehicles, fuel, chemistry, medicine, Quest rewards, Quest EXP, Faster looting, Better rewards, Better loot rewards... Damn... Where my points go? Why am I so weak? Go figure... Stick with a main build and main weapons for one playthrough otherwise forget it, if u want other quality of life things. Use mods or edit the files for more points per level

You can find what u need to progress on either day 1 or Day 20, thank you RNG and RPG elements. It's fine to cheat your Forge Ahead magazines if u still haven't found enough to craft a forge on Day 10... But wait, you have 90 in Robotics and 70 in Medicine at least cause of all the damn magazines and RNG

Force players to engage with Quests by sending them to a Trader as soon as they spawn when they finish their tutorial in a matter of seconds or minutes. Grab a quest, go to a Quest Marker on the map, click on it when u get there, now follow the ,,Dungeon" aka the Building u arrived by going through the loops that the devs hand crafted for you, for each building. It's fine if u get confused and just carve your way through the walls, but that'll make the devs sad :( cause that's now how you're supposed to play the game.
By getting to the end of the ,,Dungeon" you'll be met with lootboxes.
The moment u interact with a Quest near a Building, it will reset the entire zone, so everything u build, destroyed or harvested will be reset as it was. Use this to your advantage and destroy your immersion

U can also eat candy to mine faster, shoot better, lockpick 100%, negate fall damage. Totally realistic and fair. Jump 10 meters, explode harder & ride faster.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☑ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☑ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☑ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☑ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☑ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☑ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

Absolutely love the game..but i have to give it a negative review
Price tag of 43.99€
Development isn't going as it should be, sorry.
Multiplayer just dies on horde night, zombies either lagg or fps tanks
We're all using rtx 4070-90, i7 14700k or new i9's so it's not our hardware, also all on fiber internet

I'd love to see the game either re-done in a new engine, i'd pay 99.99$ for it again, just to be re-done
But i can't recommend it right now.Sorry.

About 11 years of early access, and when it finally came out, nothing really changed. The graphics are not good for 2024, and the game is too repetitive. Also, without Steam Workshop, there isn’t much to do.

I loved the original, the "unfinished" version. I am not sure when the game changed from a game featuring survival, crafting, and base building to a survival RPG. I enjoyed the previous version much more and am not enjoying the new format and progression system. I wish I could go back to the "Beta" version. I would not recommend this new version to my friends.

shall my grand grand children see this piece of trash getting its silly updates making slightest changes

It's a pretty complex survival game. Down to breaking your legs, getting abrasions etc. Food and water is a constant need at the beginning of the game, I feel as though it is realistic. There is always something to do in this game. Whether its quests, building, supply runs, farming, you name it, there is always something that needs to be done that keeps you coming back.

Having a blast blasting and fisting... what more do you need? Punching off heads/ cutting off heads/ shooting off heads/ catching zombies on fire/ spike traps turrets. Explosions farming building crafting traps and not to mention loot. Muh Gawd

Really slow, boring survival game. similar to minecraft. But less fun.
The best way I have found to improve the slow stamina regen is to use alt + F4

I used to love this game, but when they removed cans and water bottles from the game it broke my immersion so bad that I've just stopped playing. I even uninstalled the game after having it installed permanently on my computer for five years or so. Yes, I understand they want to make the game more difficult with making water a more difficult resource to get. They could have made getting to water more difficult by having more enemies around water sources, less water sources to find, or make the refining water system more difficult, but no. We eat glass bottles instead.

The fact that I can look at a lake while dying of dehydration is ridiculous, there's the cooking pot but nope can't dip that in the lake. My only choice is to drink straight from the source and get sick or die of dehydration. Why? Because glass bottles can't be allowed to exist, it's stupid.

Also zombies just popping into existence especially in dungeons is incredibly dumb, the dungeon crawler stuff needs to stop. 7 Days you started as an open world survival, and it doesn't feel that way anymore. There's too much emphasis now on constant combat, it's supposed to be a slow burn getting supplies, getting ready for the 7th day. It's just not that anymore, and I'm done playing

This zombie game scratches soo many needs in a game. Zombies, jump scares, hordes, guns and swords. You can fight the hordes in the street or invest in a base to fight them off till sun rise. The whole world, buildings, structures and even the ground can be destroyed for whatever the need is. You want to build a base underground or high up on stilts or a castle you can. There's also a skill point system for your character to specialize in.

Mods!! the amount of mods and community support for this game is phenomenal. Its not quite as much as Skyrim, but the gap is closing. Some really great overhaul mods like Rebirth, Darkness Falls, Undead Legacy, and Age of Oblivion that absolutely change how the game plays and feels. You want more of a darker horror feel with higher chances of death, or you want a brighter game with weak zombies, or you want to it to play more like Minecraft, however you can imagine there's mods to change things up when ur current play though is feeling stale.

Playable on Steam Deck on Ultra high settings, but gets can get laggy, especially when there's multiple zombies to deal with. Medium runs fine.

If ur on the fence about this game, just get it when it comes on sale and mod it to play how u would like a zombie game to play

It's a shame this game is unstable and has tons of bad game design because at its core, there's a good idea under all the abusive game design, bugs, and throwaway mechanics.

Even if you want to embrace it, the game will fight you because it's buggy and crashes a lot. Even if you want to like it, the devs will find some reason to introduce synthetic difficulty. Even if you try to play it fair and square, the game will glitch and turn a tense moment into a trivial encounter.

You shouldn't buy this game until they fix the problems.

You can see by the amount of hours that this was one of my favorite game ever. I used to love that game, firing it once a year and spending hundreds of hours building a nice base made out of concrete with perimeter walls to defend the exterior walls and everything. Even if the game was a bit tedious, I was fine with it because the payout was worth it.

The horde nights were a bit repetitive around day 150 or so and that was usually when I stopped playing. Then a new update would come out, and I'd be back at it.

But in one patch, they added demolishers that could take entire sections of walls due to one misplaced shot. Then they "improved" zombie AI... come on, repeat after me ZOMBIE... AI ? So now we had engineer zombies that knew exactly where to use their auger hands in order to get to you ASAP... Alright, let's make the walls thicker... nope, demolishers can go through concrete easily.

And that's when the game meta changed dramatically and I started to lose interest. It was no longer about building bases that looked good, were realistic and took time and materials to craft... no it was now stupid impossible bases floating in the air on a single pillar in order to cheese the AI as much as possible and exploit it.

TFP probably didn't like that because they added new stuff that removed the fun from the game, (screamers popping after just a couple minutes of running the stuff to make the mats to make your base). So now you had to deal with zombies calling other zombies while you were crafting mats to build your base.

Screamers would prevent you from crafting lots of resources (unless you built a "crafting" base somewhere else... which kinda sucked even more fun out of the game).

Before you buy the game, please look at what it became. Don't base your opinion on Glock9 old videos. The game is no longer about pure exploration and survival.

I like the dungeon style POI, I don't like the sleepers waking up at certain triggers...
I liked the initial implementation of the screamer zombies (once in a while but you could do a lot fo work in between)
I liked the "learn by doing" model they had for the skills
I liked building fortresses that could stand to massive hordes of zombies with me being on the wall still having to kill as many as possible to avoid them breaching my walls

Everything they introduced in the past couple years simply pushed played to cheese the AI as much as possible and that's why I (and a LOT more of the old players) don't recommend the game anymore.

It's a shame really because I think that was the game I had the most fun with in the past decade

I used to love 7 Days to Die because of its open-ended, sandbox nature. The ability to explore, loot, and strategize however I wanted was what made it one of my favorite games. But over time, the developers have moved away from that freedom, turning the game into a rigid, trigger-based experience that feels suffocating rather than immersive.

Now, instead of freely ransacking a building in my own way, I have to follow a specific path. If I don’t step on the “right” floorboard or go through the “intended” route, some zombie spawns don’t trigger, leaving the place eerily empty and forcing me to abandon missions. It completely kills the fun and experimentation that once defined the game.

The worst part? The world feels dead—not because of the apocalypse setting, but because nothing happens unless I trigger it. Sneaking into a building should feel tense and rewarding, but now it’s just a waiting game for the scripted moment when the zombies decide to appear. Instead of dynamic, unpredictable horror, I’m stuck playing a game where everything waits for my input like a lifeless amusement park ride.

I miss the days when 7 Days to Die was a true sandbox. The shift towards linear, scripted gameplay has drained the excitement and made it feel like just another restrictive, on-rails experience. If the devs don’t bring back that sense of freedom, I fear this once-great game will lose what made it special.

The game is about how some armed lawless man walks around the cities, breaks into the homes of defenseless zombies, and takes away their hard-earned property. Of course they barricade themselves, set traps, hide their treasures - but the marauder doesn't care.
On the seventh day the zombies run out of patience and they decide to pile up and punish the robber.

I have almost 500 hours. Been playing this game since alpha 17 or something.
The direction the game took is absolutely comical. It is not a survival game. It is an action arcadey zombie game with rpg and looting mechanics. It doesn't make me feel like i am playing a zombie game, at all. The performance for 1.0 release is also horrendous.
The fun pimps have shown again and again, even in their steam discussion and private website forums, that they don't care about the playerbase nor their suggestions.
They have kept this game in alpha for over a decade, and all they did was remove, add, remove, and re-add features again and again.
This is all done for money. 1.0 is also a rip-off with the price increase and i feel bad for people even thinking of buying this at full price.
It is still janky, it is still running badly, it is still missing promised features from over 6 years ago.

If you want a real zombie apocalypse game. Play project zomboid.
It is truly a shame cause this game has a ton of potential. But the fun pimps keep squandering it.

Wow. Why did I wait to play this game for so long? I feel like I tried it a long time ago before all the updates and wasn't impressed. But, I gave it a second chance today and I'm having fun. I set up my own server and can't wait until this weekend when my squad gets on to play with me. Eagerly awaiting being able to enable cross-play on my private server so my other friends who play on console can join in.

7 Days to Die

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☑ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☑ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☑ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☑ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☑ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

Probably my favorite game over the last few years.

Almost every upgrade they do makes this almost a brand new game, and they have several mayor new upgrades planned over the next year or two.

This is the game that pulled me onto Steam (done really like the DRM aspect as you can note), prefer GOG, but there is no where else to get this game.

I've found a few more vaguely similar to this game, but this remains my most played due to all the improvements / changes that keep happening to this game.

There are updates / changes that I may not like, but I still expect this to be one of my most played games.

Definitely makes may top 10.

It was great from Alpha 16 till 19 then it went completely wrong way. Newest version is the worst ever in my opinion and made me uninstall the game. Try it and decide for yourself but I can't recommend it anymore.

The game is dated to say the least, but generally plays well with a modern system. The reason I don't recommend it is because the game simply lacks content... In a game that was in development for the greater part of a decade.

If you intend to play with friends, then maybe you can eek out more enjoyment, but if you intend to play this game solo, then there's nothing end-game worth noting. The later zones are all risk and no reward, as any content found in those zones can be found elsewhere or simply crafted. The zombie AI is both easily abused and designed to make defending against them a headache normally, forcing you to abuse their AI. There's no reason to build a real base, other than to show off to others (which is as dwindling community to say the least).

All in all, this should be the last survival/craft game you should play and only if you get it on sale.

Played this game close to 8 years ago, Was buggy, incomplete, and missing direction.

Played it again recently,

Less buggy, but man, what happened? There is no soul in this game. It feels so empty and baron. I wish I could recommend it but I just can't. This game needs help and it's not here yet.

I'll be blunt and to the point.

This game spent 12 years of early access with basically no improvement.

It recently "released" with barely any change nor optimisation and the devs have doubled the price as a result.

Now they're dabbling in AI generated images to make "concept art".

I'd steer clear from this.

Game is really popular and has a lot of downloads, but it is super underrated and not talked about enough. this game is so much fun with friends or without friends. killing zombies, doing quests, crafting, building and surviving what else do you need? hordes are so fun to fight off when your whole base gets raided by zombies while you and a few buddies are defending it, even if they get in your base or you die its super funny and enjoyable. recommend!

Launched missing promised features, years late, and still runs and plays like ass. I've given it a lot of hours over a lot of years, and its still felt like the early days of an early access release, not a finished game. Maybe in the future it'll be better, but with them dropping EA, they're saying they're at 1.0, this is their vision, and everything else is gravy. Take that as you will.

1.0 Is a joke, it has to be. You'd expect it to have lots of game changing mechanics but no, Only ruining the armour system and skill/crafting system. Maybe its too much to expect but it really isn't when you decide a nothing update to be 1.0 so you can jack up the prices by almost double and force people on console to buy the game again because of their own incompetence. Seriously console was being told that so they will have update parity with pc from memory they were 5 alphas behind which is about 6-7 years behind, but 1.0 means you can now buy your way to the update instead of being abandoned! don't worry people who owned the game before got a whole 25% off on a game that they already paid for and now that the game has had a price increase of 45% they are still paying more that what they did originally.

Optimisation is so horrendously bad. I guess I get it, you've be writing spaghetti code for 11+ years now and its just to far gone. But on the other had you love to rework what doesn't need to be reworked, I mean I've seen multiple updates that were "guys this alpha the burnt zombie is now hd!" There was a whole alpha for jiggle physics... which reminds me I feel like there is a few things that make me thing how childish are you to put this in. "Bong" as a car brand, strippers and their excessive jiggle physics, extremely corny named shops and having a face option to look like Danny Trejo which I doubt they asked to have his likeness in the game.

Character customisation is terrible, you get to select from a poorly laid out list of tabs. All colours from skin tone to hair are preset named colours so for skin tone you have white, native, black or asian. Eye colour is from eyes00 to eyes34, not labelled as the colours they are and hairs is the same. You might think that oh well you'll probably be wearing armour so you can't see your customisation anyway and you'd for the most part be right but they have removed arguably what I though was the best mechanic of this game, the armour has been severely downgraded instead of getting to choose the specific pieces of armour. Armour pre 1.0 was broken into helmet, glasses, face, coat, chest armor, shirt, arms, pant armour, pants and boots. So you could mix and match, get your style but now its has been reduced down into head, chest, legs, feet. And now clearly all armour is obsolete and you should go for the nerd armour so you get more XP and a chance to get a whole bonus skill point on level up.

They changed skill points and I will say its probably better for a solo but its a nightmare for a group. Now instead of people organising what profession or what their build will be by choosing with skill points to unlock crafting. You have to collect skill books (and alot of them) to get crafting unlocks meaning you need to track who needs what book, what books you can use for yourself and then a storage just incase someone wanted that book. books help unlock crafting of specific items like handgun book for handguns ect, but there are so many books and you need something like 40 of them to unlock everything in a tree and more you unlock of specific thing the higher level you can craft. Which brings me onto legendary or level 6 items. They weren't exactly hard to get but not easy before 1.0 but now you need a legendary part which are exceedingly rare or exceedingly expensive and you never want to use the ones you get because what if its not any better or you hold on until you get the next tier of item.

Questing is boiled down to fetch, kill, flick a switch or dig for 10 minutes looking for a container which by the way doesn't care if it spawns under the road. Quest are extremely repetitive and a necessary thing to keep ahead of scaling because you can't rely on rng of houses to give all loot, instead you need rng on the traders. One of the big notes of 1.0 by the way was each biome has a different trader... because thats ground breaking technology.

These devs truly are the masters of promising and not delivering ever since I brought the game back in 2018 they have been saying that bandits are looking good and that they will be in the next update but every time an update would come out there was no bandits, time and time again always "next update". From memory they did add bandits I believe in alpha 14 and removed it shortly.

Something that you'll notice straight away about 1.0 is that EVERY TIME that you open the game it will show an advertisement for the next game... every time, no way to say don't show this again. sure its easy to skip past but are you fucking kidding. Do something like risk of rain 2 where they promote their dlc on that main menu as a small but noticeable floating tab. It feels so slimy to have an advertisement on another game that takes up the whole screen when you are still updating this game with a road map... in 1.0... with bandits and one of those 'milestones'. Something I forgot to mention, weather. Weather in 7 days has always been almost non existent sometimes its foggy sometimes low quality jpeg of a rain drop = rain. But the point I'm getting to is you used to need specific clothes for different climate, cold makes you freeze and heat makes you more dehydrated. honestly pretty boring system and you didn't have to care for it at all. But with 1.0 they removed they whole temperature system. I think its so they can add it back with the current next update which will apparently add "elemental survival".

I really don't like what they have done with guns in 1.0. It feels like they want they game to be more of a rust pvp thing but they game sure as hell isn't built to support it. It used to be exciting to find a pistol which for some reason would only spawn in toilets but with 1.0 if you haven't found a shitty pipe pistol by your second or third house your having some bad luck. Most animation for pipe weapon are jank, have obvious clipping or just don't work. Gunplay feels very simple and just not good.

Multiplayer works... but there's some things wrong with it. Like if you watch someone walk back or forward for less that 5 meters for some reason the proportions of a leg shrinks. If your playing with a group you'll want to make a group so you can see where your friends are and how much health their on. I'm not sure knowing the health of each other is a good choice but my biggest problem with this is instead of remembering that you were partied up you have to make a new party and invite everyone, every time you close and relaunch. And relaunching has reminding me of two terrible parts to this game. Not only does it take forever to create a map (something like 5-10 minutes) but it felt like an unfair coin flip on if I was joining would I have to 'download the map' again and that would take 2-3 minutes, It depends on how much you've explore I assume, we really didn't explore all that much and it was already up to 2 minutes wait time just to launch. I don't understand why I have to download the map or at least the size of the download shouldn't be that big because I'm not hosting. I don't know any other game that makes you wait to download the map, I sure as hell ain't downloading a whole world each time i join a minecraft or projectzomboid server.

The other thing that relaunching has reminded me of is this game has a wicked memory leak on top of its horrendous optimisation, having to restart you're game every hour or two hour is very annoying because its a slow fall of frame rate until you can't deal with it anymore. The fact that my high end pc can't get consistent frame rate it bewildering, the fact that 60 fps is a struggle on medium settings and having very consistent stutters on a 3080ti and i9 10850k

The zombies in this zombie game are quite boring. I will admit the different types of zombies are cool but there is zero variety in how they look. The cop will always look like that blue cop, normal zombies will be one of the few selected presets, ect

More to say but, game bad

I absolutely love this game. It has a perfect survival to build ratio. I just wish wish wish the saves would stay!!! I have had to start over so many times, while the game is fun, trying to rebuild is tedious. Yeah there's a god mode and I could easily rebuild. But that takes the accomplishment of days away. Being on day 21 going back to day 1 with nothing kinda sucks. Overall 5 star game. Developers, PLEASE please pleaaaase fix the saves being deleted with updates. Would be much appreciated 👏🏻 🙏🏻

They badly need to rework how infections work, or at the very least provide a setting to lower the chance of infection. because its just plain not fun to deal with when a silent dog runs up behind you and bights you once and now you have to use ANOTHER anti biotic, makes perma death runs straight up annoying and not even fun.

Developers have spent a decade trying to turn what was once a great Sandbox survival zombie-minecraft with RPG elements into a very poorly designed "fantasy" RPG. What does that mean? Instead of simply spawning in a world and doing your best to survive, you must go through the developer's intended experience, doing the same repetitive tasks from the very beginning. See that house over the road? Well that's no longer a house thats now a "POI" aka Dungeon. Its full of scritped zombies that'll pop in as you walk the inteded path, or bug out if you don't.
Want to get some clean water? well collecting and boiling water was considered too easy and not RPG enough, so now drinking water results in the character eating the glass jar and you flat out cant collect dirty water anymore. Why? The developers implemented a new water filtering station. You need to have read enough magazines to even get the crafting workbench and, along with whatever the water filtering station requires as well.
You hardly progress by simply exploring, looting and surviving anymore, instead, as soon as the game starts, you are forced to find a trader (even if theyre kilometers away) and start questing for them. This will send you to a random hou- Sorry, POI, respawn all the scripted zombies and loot inside and let you do the intended path until you complete the dungeon-POI and progress that specific trader a little.
Then you do it over and over until the trader decides you are worthy of doing the same POI clearing quests but for someone else, they send you far away into a new biome where you start doing the same. Rinse and repeat, thats the game now. Hope you like walking back and forth between your house, the trader, the dungeon and back.

As a result, everything feels fake and scripted. Your character's growth is determined by eating magazines, zombies, loot found and rewards are affected by a lootstage, you can simply reset houses. Instead of zombies roaming the world there's just a couple on ground level and most spawn inside the POI using invisible triggers. the world just doesn't feel natural. It feels as if you installed a very crappy RPG mod with classes on a far-from-finished survival game. And developers have spent like a decade doing this "mod", recreating its skill trees and classes several times through the years. Thats pretty much all they've been busy with.

TLDR: Game shifted experience from sandbox survival with light rpg elements to very poorly designed fantasy RPG-like.

They some how made their game less optimized than Ark SE, which is saying something, with no ability to actually fix the majority of issues that crop up as a result. On another note, in their attempt to switch genres mid development for some asinine reason, they made the game unplayable without mods, and even then the lack of optimization remains an issue.
Your game used to be really good, now it's an irritation. I hope you'll get your act straight, but i won't hold my breath.

it's a amazing game that i currently have 115 hrs in but i absolutly hate how far it's strayed from the survival and base building aspect. i miss all the building blocks and upgrades you could do to traps and base blocks. and the removal of all the clothe you could find and random materials you could find i like the cooking and grafting, and the skills and books but this game feels more like a RPG nothing like what it is advertised as and used to be. i remember all the amazing videos on this game from vertigo gaming. but it seems it's changed alot from that. i hope eventually they realize this and make it more survial again

After 140 hours I can only say, it's good fun until it's not.
The moment you reach your "end-game", the fun mostly stops.
The problem lies in that "end-game" doesn't really exist. It all depends on when you personally feel like you've achieved everything you want from a run.
You can always keep grinding endlessly, which only reminds me of Vaas from Far Cry 3 asking me if I know what the definition of insanity is.

The game is great overall but there are some major negatives.

It's either too easy or too hard.
The game is pretty boring for the easy part, just 1 or 2 tapping zeds you spot,
OR you will be rushed by so many zeds you have to run and kite your way to safety, which is a pain with how dodgy these c*nts move.

Which brings me to my next point.
Stealth... it exists.
You get a small damage bonus when attacking enemies from the shadows, bigger bonuses with certain weapon types.
Now you'd think that in a post-apocalyptic world stealth means everything. Stay hidden and you'll never be spotted.
Well, The Fun Pimps think otherwise by implementing "trigger points" in every POI (yes, all of them), where zeds will just spawn in and aggro you.
For this reason stealth is something you can completely ignore in this game.

Enemies are well designed up until the demolition zombie. Which, if you hit it in the wrong (or right) spot will beep and explode seconds later dealing massive damage to anything around it. I mean, why not give them a beard and call them something else. It's just agonising and another weird design choice by The (at this point not so...) Fun Pimps.
Forget about the red-eyed wolf if you're not gonna cheese him. Whoever decided to give him a 1000 hp pool should be fired.

Now for my biggest gripe and the reason I'm writing this review, a bug.
Sometimes quests won't complete.
This happens cause The Fun Pimps want you to explore POI's exactly how they designed them.
As I mentioned earlier, all POI's have trigger points, where if you reach that point in the location a wave of zeds will spawn and aggro you. When these points won't trigger, the zeds won't spawn and you won't be able to complete the quest.
This happened to me 3 times in 2 days.
Now bear in mind, tier 5 quests are only in specific locations, and probably a fair distance away from your base.
So you'll have to drive 2-5 miles, spend over an hour clearing a 15 story building or a school, only to realise at the end of it that something isn't right cause the quest won't complete.

First of all, in my opinion, a mechanic like these "trigger points" shouldn't exist in a game like this in the first place as it completely negates the feeling of freedom and obliterates any use of stealth.
Second, if you do decide to implement this mechanic, at least make sure it's working as intended.
A bug like this shouldn't exist in a 1.2 version of a game.

The combat.
Combat is mostly sluggish. Trying to hit enemies with melee weapons can be as hard as hitting them with guns.
Mostly because of how these Rushy McGee's move.
As I mentioned earlier, it's mostly boring 1 tapping them in the face, but the ones who don't die from 1 hit immediately become annoying cause of the dodgy movement and the attack animation bug.

It's a solid open world survival game with good crafting mechanics but I would only recommend if you hate being stealthy and don't mind the bugs I mentioned.

A20.7 was the last good update this game had. After that it started to go downhill so I kept the game on the beta branch back on A20.7. Now that I can't seem to get that older version to run without causing a BSOD so I decided to double check and see if my opinion on this had changed now that it reached 1.2

And no, it has not.

The skill mag system is still a massive mistake. The fact that I can find magazines to craft better equipment that I cannot make because I still haven't found enough mags to craft a workbench is such garbage progression. How can I be a good farmer if somehow I know nothing of seeds? Why are these separate progressions? How is that a good idea?

They made water collection incredibly dumb and apparently you eat the glass bottle too when you drink the water now instead of keeping it like a sane person.

The reduced customization of your character is awful, combined with a less interesting armor system.
Sure the character models and the armor look a bit nicer but functionally are far less interesting than they were in A20.7

Trying to "survive" in the beginning is just the same thing no matter what you want to do because if you don't just go loot a bunch of houses and expect to try and sweaty your way through the blood moon you are just going to die.

Also, do remember that leveling up barely helps you at all as skill mags are the only way you are going to get the real helpful things like, oh I don't know, actually being able to make the things you need. Sure you can slightly increase your chances that RNGsus might give you the mags you need but frankly it barely changes what you find at all.

Which also means if you had an Idea of how you wanted to survive, well you can go fuck yourself because you are going to survive based on whatever RNGsus ordained to give you. Both in gear and skill mags. Because to hell with trying to actually build a skill up towards something, we're just going to lock progression behind random skill mags. Yay! random good right?

I have no idea why these changes were made because they are astoundingly bad. The game is harder the same way that trying to roll snake eyes on 2d20 is harder than trying to roll snake eyes on 2d6. That is not an interesting difficulty increase. Just an annoying one. These changes were not "fun". These changes are the opposite of "fun" and are terribly restrictive and reductive to the overall experience.

Very fun game play loop, survival, and base building, especially with friends

Having played this game for just a little bit now, I can admit that I might have a problem. Survival grinding, looting, building, crafting and killing zombies! What more could you ask for? I've been playing this game for about 9 years off and on. I can leave it for 6 months and come right back to play it all over again. I can honestly say that I've never enjoyed another game more than this one. God bless the Fun Pimps!

One of the best games I ever played! I highly recommend this game because of all the small details this game has, and because of all the items that you can craft and obtain, however the only bad thing about this game is that you need a pretty powerful PC to run this.

But awesome game anyway hope you enyoy it too!

Love this game!!! Hours and hours of crazy fun. If you like zombie shooters this one is a must!

This game is the best. Ive been playing since beta and it gets better with each update. I have 4400 hours.... thats half of a year and i feel like that speaks for itself. 7 days is everything you want in a survival game, replay value is endless, and fps aspect is great. Love this game.