Well, I certainly have my complaints, but honestly it's been a surprisingly fun game. Better than many in this genre, and something I think I'll get my money's worth out of. Though I suspect it will lack the staying power of games like 7 Days to Die, or even Icarus.
I advise against watching the video. Like most game videos it doesn't represent gameplay, doesn't show the UI, and doesn't give an idea of game features. This one is worse than most because it really makes the game look cartoony for some reason, while the game itself is quite graphically well done. I almost didn't try it because of the video; glad I did though.
General gameplay is relatively fun. It has a bit of a 7 Days to Die feel, though without the richly interactive world. It's not voxel based, so no destructable terrain or destructable buildings/blocks. But still, it has that 'feel' to it.
This is especially true with the horde nights. Days are relatively long, which is nice, and *every* night you get attacked by a horde. Unlike 7DTD, you're relying mostly on your base and wide array of Dungeon Keeper-esque traps. Most of your time is spent repairing and reloading instead of attacking enemies, and it's a fun journey of learning to design a base with that in mind that I haven't figured out yet. Also challenging: we haven't survived one yet! :)
In fact, a lot of the game leans towards macromanagement, which is an interesting change from other games. You get a follower right off, who helps with a lot of the grunt work. Hunting takes a back seat to building and setting traps and managing resources for bait. Food seems to rely heavily on upgrading farms and having a huge number of them, though they're a little oversimplified imo. And looting seems to provide enough resources that you rarely need to mine or chop trees (or even farm at this point).
And can we talk about one of my favorite features: You can craft with stuff in your boxes. As long as you're near your base, even 50+ yards out, you can craft at workstations, build foundations and traps, and craft whatever else without having your stuff on your person. This is long overdue and yet completely ignored by so many other games.
Combat is unfortunately questionable. It's often unclear if you hit an enemy, since there's so little in the way of staggers or reactions. Your weapon's hitbox also seems oddly small. Especially when aiming at anything outside the chest-height plane of your character; I've spent 30 seconds swinging at a zombie on the ground without success before finally pulling out my bow; it's very weird. And it's very common for my camera to end up inside a zombie. In short, the combat feels sluggish and unresponsive to me; contrary to how the video makes it feel incredible FPS-action.
Weapon and item tiers and upgradability, and the coil system, add a nice layer of complexity and growth. Looks like traps will have the same elements, though we've yet to figure out how to apply the cool mods we've made for them.
That leads to the quests. There's a nice quest interface, and the screenshots they include are very helpful. But you get quest overload and so end up skipping many. Further, they seem written by a non-native English speaker, which results in lack of details, especially in the voiceovers that more often than not tell you nothing. It's too bad, because it could be a great vehicle for new player learning, and it just isn't used super effectively.
I've been playing a variety of survival games like this over the past couple years and what continually surprises me is that we're over a decade out from 7 Days to Die first gaining relevance, far more from Minecraft's beginnings, and yet new games are still failing to meet some of the basic standards that were set by them; especially in the UI, the most important component of any game.
Inventory management in this game, like most, is a nightmare. Mostly because of a missing: "add to stacks" button. When you get home you just want to open a box and hit a button to put stuff in, but NotD only gives you an "add all" button, which fills all the empty space in your box with all your stuff, which you then need to manually remove. It literally takes 10 minutes to sit there and go through your inventory manually for each box. We've found a workaround by padding our boxes with single pieces of stone, but still: why is this necessary in 2025?!
The toolbar is effective 6 slots. That's because you can't scroll through it with your mouse wheel, and the 7 key is too far to reach with your left hand without moving off of WASD (which is uncomfortable) or taking your right hand off of the mouse. Worse, you can't map the 7+ toolbar slots to your mouse buttons; the only other reasonable option. What do they think players are going to do?
Similar examples abound. There's no minutes timer (and thus no granular information about the time), so you end up running to your horde base early, and sitting there doing nothing waiting for the horde. I feel like I lack other granular (or even any) details about important info in the game as well, from enemy hp (or even enemy state; ie: healthy/hurt/bloodied/etc) to my own stats (and how they change in relation to my attributes).
Still, I'm having a lot of fun so far and have already gotten more hours out of it than I did Subsistence, and for a reasonable price, so I'm pretty happy. And I'm still aching to blow off work and responsibilities to play more; what more can you ask of a game. And hopefully the devs will continue to refine and fix the problems going forward.
