2.5/5 ★ – FerrumCrow's review of Project Zomboid.

Played from – to: (2023-02-28 – 2023-04-27) – PC keyboard. ‣ 5/10 – This is how you die. ‣ Thoughts: I can see why so many call this one of the best zombie-survival games and I really wanted to like it myself. Sadly, after many attempts I’ve concluded that this is simply not for me. The game is very immersive and the attention to detail is crazy. Playing this with a few friends was fun and there were incredible moments that no other game can replicate, however the way Project Zomboid is structured didn’t vibe with me. This is a sandbox game, meaning you are thrown into a world and must create your adventures. It’s all great and works fine, but the lack of an overall goal besides finite survival and exploration could only keep me going for so long. I understand this is my games preference interfering as I’m more of a narrative game enthusiast. Secondly, dying here is very demoralizing. Yes, you can respawn close to your base, loot your corpse, and keep going, however, you are a new character and have no skills that you worked so hard on getting. Dying and losing your precious characters is the whole point of Project Zomboid, but that is something I found annoying and repetitive. Lastly, the game heavily relies on a plethora of menus. Want to heal? Open a full X-ray body scan report of yourself and click on a limb that’s damaged. Want to eat? Go to the crafting menu, find the food can and open it up etc. So much of the game happens in menus that you sort of lose the immersion the game so masterfully creates which is a big downer for me. All in all, Project Zomboid is a great game, but everything it does just didn’t seem fun to me. It mostly felt repetitive, shallow, and heavily dependent on the player’s creativity. It also doesn’t help the case that Project Zomboid is extremely difficult to get into without guidance. There’s not much help for new players and you must just know things, key binds etc. That is probably the biggest reason why I found this game so avoidable.