3/5 ★ – administrator's review of 7 Days to Die.

7 Days to Die is one of those few an open-world multiplayer games where I want to join a populated server, but I don't want to see any other players. Yes, there is single player, but the game shines when you're foraging around a building for supplies and look out the window to see a group of three players making their way toward you. Do you hide? Fight? Run? It's intense. In likeness to my opinion of STALKER, the early game is the best. Once you have turrets and stocks of ammo it becomes very easy to coast through the map. You end up looting all the good stuff without panicking that you're on 18% thirst and 26% hunger and you really need to find a tin of food, a grill or a forge schematic ASAP or risk dysentery by drinking a couple of the 18 jars of murky water you have rattling around your backpack. The zombies and other wildlife are dangerous early on, and this is partly because they can quickly do some debilitating damage in the early game if you're not careful... but it's also due to the janky buggy nature of the game. Unfortunately this game, despite being in Steam Greenlight/beta for... *checks notes*... 11 years (and finally reaching v1.0 in July 25th 2024,) has generally suffered, throughout development to this day, from the same core issues which frustrate the careful, low level player like me. Zombies pop into existence around you, NPC movement is jerky and sporadic (not in a "regular zombie" way mind, but in a "my pathfinding is fucked and so I shall wiggle and jolt and zoom randomly" way) and the damage you can cause and that can be caused upon you is partially RNG'd. You might get pecked by some flying hell-bird once and end up bleeding out, losing all your looted stuff. These aspects of the game can be rage-inducing... but you know what? It's also part of the charm. Fighting with the game somehow feels like fighting against the world the game is portraying, and by golly does that world hate you. Society is gone and you're plucking morsels out of its corpse, hoping you keep your wits about you enough to not become one of those very morsels yourself. The developers set out to build this and they've delivered. And yeah, it isn't perfect or what my imagination led me to believe it would be back in the kickstarter days. It is good fun though. They should be proud. Oh, basebuilding and terrain manipulation is a big aspect of this game that I shouldn't neglect to mention. Pretty much everything... no, I actually think *everything* can be destroyed. You can take ownership of a building and modify it, create a castle, a cave system, a treehouse. It's very good once you get deep enough to take advantage. Again, it has its own unique '7dtd jank' that is somehow acceptable? I don't know. I really like the early game, I really hate getting killed by a zombie that surprise-spawns on my face, I love creeping around and hiding from other players, bow in hand, hoping they don't look my way and see me crouched behind that tree. I have rated this 3/5, slightly above average, because when it sucks it really sucks. But overall, it's an exciting game, if you can get past the wonky implementation. I heartily recommend it, especially if you have a few people to play it with on a stable and well managed public server. I keep coming back to it.