7 Days to Die

This is a hard review for me to write. I've put a good amount of time into this janky, fun game over the past decade. In the time this game has taken to make moderate changes, I've become a different person, moved to another city, and moved in with my long-term partners, and now we all play this game together. And I still don't think I can recommend it with my chest. So I guess... let's start with the good. I adore crafting in this game. The crafting is, basically, "Hit button to craft," but there are so many different crafting "tables" in the game that a good session has me bouncing from station to station over several minutes, waiting for my various tables to craft all the things I need. It's unironically a ton of fun (even if the UI is hot garbage). Most of my time spent in this game has been mining and crafting, which is exactly how I want it. Other good things: The game is fairly generous, and you can get pretty granular with the server settings, down to adjusting how plentiful items are and how plentiful (or scarce) certain essential resources are. I enjoy the updates made to the visuals, although overall there is a strong visual design language that could be boiled down to "mud." And the rhythm of the 7 day structure is very fun, especially for a zombie game. Getting attacked by a huge horde every night would get old in this kind of game really quickly. But getting attacked every 7 days (and you get to control how long the days are, in the aforementioned settings) is just about the sweet spot. You get to do whatever for 7 days, then batten down the hatches for the huge horde. It's great. And the bad. The game is only *technically* in full release. It released its 1.0 update so that it could release on certain other platforms that don't allow Early Access. And if that was all, I wouldn't care! But the game is NOT at a 1.0 level of polish. Every single time you play, you will encounter a new bug. One of my partners clicked on a destroyed truck, and a chunk of the ground despawned under him. We put water in a sink, and when we walked outside, the water had poured through a wall and was just aimlessly, endlessly spilling down a hill. My other partner broke a fence, on the ground, that wasn't attached to any part of a house, and a piece of the house broke off (technically, this isn't a bug, it's just kinda stupid). And this is not touching on the thiiiiick amount of jank the game has. Don't get me wrong: I love jank. I play Early Access games all the time, and I have to live with the consequences of my actions. And 7 Days has polished away a surprising amount of that jank. But the problem is that the game is practically *built* on jank, and so any aspect they polish really just shows how janky the rest of the game is. Signs don't rotate when you're placing them when you press the rotate button... you have to press the OTHER rotate button, which is not on the mouse. Zombies can see the "heat" you generate from literally any distance, and with default settings that includes being able to dig down several stories to get to where you're like, cooking food or forging iron. Zombies have inconsistent rules regarding their pathing, and with how they interact with basic physics. I could go on for hours. The game is simultaneously one of the best examples of the zombie survival-crafting genre AND one of the cautionary tales of gaming. It's great, and I kinda hate it, and I'll probably play it again tomorrow.

# 🚫 Do Not Buy at Full Price 🚫 As someone who has **nearly 900 hours** in this game, has **modded it into the next dimension**, and has spent years coming back to it, I feel qualified to say this: ## Wait for a Sale. This game was a fantastic pickup when it was **$15 on sale** or even **$20 at full price**. Back then, it was a flawed gem that the community lovingly polished into something special. Today? They're asking **$45** for a game whose longevity and popularity is propped up by one of the most dedicated modding communities around. Let me be clear: > The modders added value. > > The modders fixed problems. > > The modders kept people playing. The base game did not suddenly become worth **more than double** what many of us originally paid just because the calendar kept moving forward. Don't get me wrong. I clearly enjoyed the game. You don't accidentally put **900 hours** into something. But enjoyment and value are two different conversations. ### My Recommendation Buy it on sale. Enjoy the incredible modding scene. Do **not** pay $45 expecting a modern premium experience. At its old price, this was an easy recommendation. At **$45**, it's just money hungry out of touch studio thinking they delivered a AAA title while handing us a game that still cant comprehend the actual concept of a half block being idk HALF A BLOCK instead of still taking up a full block.

someone hit me up when this game is good again.

The game has changed a lot in the last couple of years and it is not the game I used to like.. i am not playing it anymore unfortunately.. very sad...

I used to love this game, I started playing back in Alpha 16. I haven't played this game as long as a lot of other people here, but even I could see the direction of the game changing. There were always POIs with a scripted path and event triggers inside the rooms, but as development continued those became more and more common until that's all that was left. The scripted zombie triggers in every third room of a building completely invalidated stealth builds and the loot system made having to grind the POIs a hard requirement to progress. The focus on zombie pathfinding turned base building into a convoluted tower defence game. You weren't allowed to find clever ways to trick the zombies, doing so would trigger 'rage mode' and the zombies would just start attacking all structures around them, further pushing the requirement to carefully plan out a path for the zombies to follow so they wouldn't just smash their way directly to you. The constant total reworking of the skills system was tolerable but incredibly annoying as the devs clearly couldn't decide on what they wanted to do with it, but the decision to make the player into a scrawney weakling meant you had to put points into every skill tree just to be average. You can't specialize in only one skill tree, no matter how much they try to make it look like you can. Every tree has skills required just to have a decent chance of surviving, this means you die to everything in the beginning, even random wildlife, and making progress into anything you actually want to be good at is frustratingly slow. On top of that, skills aren't enough to actually learn the recipes you need to craft decent gear anymore, now you have to rely entirely on loot RNG to find enough magazines for the specific gear you want. The biggest thing that killed all of my interest in the game was the v1.0 outfit system. Before v1.0 armor and clothing was fully modular, you could mix and match 4 clothing slots and 5 armor slots, with each clothing and armor piece having attachment slots depending on it's quality for further modify your loadout. All of that was completely replaced with the new outfit system where you now need a specific outfit to do a specific task. You're not allowed to build a loadout perfectly suited to your playstyle anymore, now you have to use inventory slots to carry around entire outfit sets specialized for every specific task you want to do. This game went from a survival crafting sandbox into a poorly designed RPG. I haven't touched this game since v1.0 released and have no plans to come back unless they make drastic changes to return to when it was fun.

The developers clearly have no idea what they even want to do and have remade this game several times. What was sold as a survival sandbox, is nothing more than a shoot and loot game at this point. After their merger with Behaviour, it has become more of a cash grab than anything else. The one good thing came in a recent update after the merger. A broader array of options was added, making it closer to the sandbox game that was originally advertised. The mod community for this game is amazing, and if you have the game already, I'd check some of them out. If this game were less than 20 USD, I'd consider it worth the value, but at 45 USD, I cannot recommend it. Watch for a sale if you're curious about this game.

Undisclosed IA use

theyve gotten greedy. bought this for $20 and while the market has gotten more expesive so the price needs to go up to compete y the heck are we being asked to pay $10+ for singular DLC outfits? i have over 600 hrs. i liked what this started out as. but now its just greed. sorry Fun Pimps but i wont suggest this to any new players