7 Days to Die

Fun game but Fun Pimps are absolutely tweaking. 45 dollars is way to much, would recommend not to buy until a sale is up. I bought this game for 15$. 45 is way to much Fun Pimps.

The game gets worse with each patch. When the community complains, the devs blame the community for them not being able to do more updates because they have to fix all the things they made worse. It's a cycle that's been going on for years and shows no signs of ever changing. The jar system they added (which was them attempting to save face after ruining a bunch of other survival aspects) sucks. It's just an annoyance that serves no real purpose. The smell system sucks. It "solved" a problem that didn't exist and just made managing food items even more of a chore for the player. The biome hazard system sucks. It feels the same in every biome - you get 3 minutes to be outside before you need to spend 1 minute inside. Eventually you craft an item become permanently immune to it. The storms that roll in are just more severe versions of this same mechanic. Ultimately it just wastes your time, as you need to keep afking inside structures to refill the meter. The items you can craft for temporary immunity only last 5 minutes and use difficult to acquire materials, making them largely useless. It's another problem that didn't need solving and just wastes your time. The central gameplay loop is getting a quest from a trader, which sends you to a nearby(ish) point of interest (POI), and then progressing through that POI to complete the objective. That typically involves either killing all zombies and/or fetching a special item. The POIs are really the best part of the game. There are a lot of them and many have really well done, under-stated story lines going on, e.g. a secret rooster fighting ring or animals being genetically altered. It's very much a "show, don't tell" approach that works well. Unfortunately, this is one of the only things I have to speak positively about. Stealth is mostly worthless now. They've moved more and more of the POI zombies to just appear out of thin air. Typically when they all spawn in, they immediately know where you are and charge straight at you. Quests at POIs typically require you to full clear the area to complete it, so there's really no avoiding these forced ambushes, even when you know exactly when and where they're coming from. Stealth against enemies that are spawned in normally generally works fine, but there are fewer and fewer spawned in that way. Some POI spawns are so badly set up that enemies will materialize just a few steps in front of you. Part of this was because they could never fix their performance issues from having more zombies spawned in. Had they made the spawns happen at more natural points (e.g. ascending to a second floor) they could've achieved more natural spawning without as much being in at once. Unfortunately, they did a half-assed job and now we just get things spawning in pre-aggroed all the time. Item progression sucks since 1.0. They nerfed quest rewards into the ground, so pretty much all of your armor and weapons come from crafting. The problem is they're all gated by the same materials. For example, a wooden bow, a compound bow, a crossbow, and a compound crossbow all require the same bow parts. All of them require the same legendary part for a tier 6. Because you can't make parts and they're found so rarely, you basically don't craft more than two of a weapon type throughout the whole game, with the second usually being a max level legendary. Since legendary parts for the best item type are the same as the worst item type, you're never going to make the lower type's legendary. Armor sets are worse than weapons. The only progression is tier 1 to tier 6 of a single armor type. Fortunately the set bonuses are mostly useless so you can just pick the individual item bonuses you want, but the system before sets was simply better. Do you really want to switch all your gear to a farmer set each time you harvest crops? Do you really want to switch all your gear to a mining set each time you mine ore? Do you really want to switch all your gear to a lumberjack set each time you chop wood? It's just more player time wasted. The current map generation sucks. The one good thing is that the actual generation time is much faster -- it used to take as much as 15 minutes to complete. However, they changed how biome are laid out and now they look completely artificial. The default, center forest, makes the middle circle of the map a forest and each remaining corner a different biome. There's no more natural transitions between biomes. The other options you can choose from are worse. When they changed the map generation, they also made forest settlements tiny. You only get only small towns, which means a low number of POIs. This cannot be controlled in the generation config. This very rapidly leads to the first trader sending you to POIs 1km+ away, as early as the first day or two. This is a huge waste of player time as that takes a long time to travel on a bike, let alone on food. Imagine doing 30 quests where half of them involve spending 5 minutes just traveling to the POI. That's the current state. The one good? thing about this game is all the old major versions are selectable from the config. But, if your selling point is "just play the version from 5 years ago," it's not very compelling. 7 Days has been in development for 13 years, and 2 years have passed since 1.0 was released along with paid cosmetic DLCs (which, incidentally, were part of the onus for changing the armor and clothing system since they needed a way to shoehorn them in). The game is now all the way up to 3.0, but for some reason they're still calling it early access. Overall there's just not much reason to start playing now as a new player, since you can just expect the game to continue in the downward trajectory it's been on for years.