Can you survive the Night?

Greetings my fellow gamers! I recently had the chance to play this wonderful, yet extremely difficult game, called 7 Days to Die. This game is ridiculously fun! It captures the essence of survival horror games and the creative building freedom of Minecraft. If you enjoy crafting games and hordes of zombies this game might be up your ally.

7 Days to Die is still in it’s alpha stage but can be purchased and played through either Steam or their website (https://7daystodie.com/buy/). This game was developed and created by a group of dedicated programmers called The Fun Pimps.

Now a quick, brief introduction about this game. When you spawn, you have nothing. You have an inventory with no items, (or sometimes some items depending on the host). From there you must survive. The entire area had been taken over by zombies and nothing is stopping them from eating the flesh right off your face. Nothing except your wits. You, as the survivor, must travel and explore the unknown areas gathering materials and resources in order to build tools, weapons, and additional materials to find or build a base in order to survive the night.

You want to build your base and gather your resources before night time because once that sun goes down the zombies become more dangerous! The night is not your friend. Matter of fact once night time hits if you aren’t ready you pretty much don’t have a chance.

The concept of this game is very simple. Gather materials, build tools and weapons, find a base to fortify, defend that base, and do your best to survive the night, all while eating and drinking enough food and water. That’s correct! This game has a hunger and thirst meter that have positive and negative effects on your character. The approach of this concept is what makes this game amazingly fun and exciting. You find random items in cars, abandoned homes, farms, office buildings, and dead bodies. Almost everywhere! This game has it covered. You can break down houses for wood in order to reinforce another house, board up windows and build escape ways just in case. The way you survive is truly up to you and your creativity.

Now I personally love this game. It is very young and has a lot of bugs, but the amount of potential this game has is endless. The zombies are terrifying, especially at night, and the building/crafting aspect is extremely easy and fun. The game starts with nothing,  (you have nothing in your inventory) and the game doesn’t help you at all. No explanation of what does what and where to even get the materials, but that’s the fun of it. You feel lost, just as you should if you were in that situation in real life. Finding materials isn’t too difficult and once you get the right tools, you’ll have no problems finding weapons to defend yourself. The beauty of this game is that it is a process. The whole game is about the process of preparing for the night, gathering food, making sure you have enough water, setting up traps around the house, etc. It’s a long process that you will obsess about over and over again. After you survive the first night you’ll look back and realize, “Shit, I need to find a new place”, and the whole process starts over again. The whole concept of food and water is also extremely fun. It’s fine to find a building, reinforce it, and kill all the zombies but food is scarce. It’s the food and water that forces you to go outside, travel, and explore for more materials. You can’t stay in one spot for very long and for that reason, the game requires you to move around a lot.

The crafting is very simple and similar to Minecraft. You find the materials, place it in the right spot, and if it is correct, you’ll be able to create that item. The game gives you the basic blueprints for some craftable items. You can learn how to craft more items as you progress through the game and find more blueprints. And if you’re worried about the combat, all I can say is that it isn’t to bad. The combat does have some work ahead of itself. Although the melee weapons do swing in a similar pattern as Minecraft. The range weapons does feel like a true FPS, not some blocky line that shakes every time you shoot it. You will feel each bullet leaving the barrel along with the desperation each bullet has, hoping it hits something.

 

One additional thing  that I really enjoy about this game are the zombies. They are very simple in the sense that there isn’t much animation to them but they are still terrifying when you have to fight them. The reason is because when they swarm they really swarm. You do not want to be caught off guard. They will run you down just as quickly as zombies in other horde zombie games.

The environment of this game is also well done. The noises these zombies make can be heard even when you don’t see any zombies around, giving you that feeling that you never really are safe.

Overall 7 Days to Die is a great game for multiplayer game and a well made survival game. It’s still in the alpha stage and has a lot of work ahead of it but the future is very bright for this game.

Let me know what you guys think about this game! I know I covered the basics but there are still a lot of features that I wasn’t able to cover. Comment and don’t forget to follow if you enjoyed this review! Speak your mind and let your voice be heard. Let us know if you enjoyed this game or not and tell us why!

From Indie-Vidual Gamers, thanks for reading and see you soon!