The character models are horrible, and the environment, intentionally or not, is blocky, drab, and lifeless. Even for a budget title, its aesthetic is so shoddy that it’s hard to engage with the world properly. One of the biggest problems with 7 Days to Die, as shallow as it sounds, is that it’s hideously ugly. Whatever you do, you have to make sure you’re ready for the horde every seven days. You may choose to dig in and fortify, scavenging food and water and firewood to stay alive, or you may choose to go out and explore, braving the zombie-infested wilds in the search for civilisation, other players or rarer crafting materials. Once you’ve mastered the basics, how you survive is up to you, whether you’re playing alone or with others. The build menu isn’t the easiest thing to navigate, especially with the transition from mouse and keyboard to game pad, but it’s fit for purpose. Your first job is to make tools and clothes, then gather materials to build up your base, which you can make from any broken down old building you find or simply construct from scratch. Either way, a tutorial leads you through the basics as you find yourself stranded in the weirdly varied eco-system of the procedurally generated and impossible to pronounce Navezgane province of the US, which is sometimes a desert, sometimes a snowy waste, sometimes a field. It’s a Minecraft-inspired approach to gathering whereby you’ll begin with nothing and will have to pound on objects with your bare hands to scrounge up what remains, which is just stupid in a real-world context. Also, every 7 in-game days will see a horde of the blighters come together and go on a brain-hungry rampage – which gives you one week at a time to prepare for the worst.Īs with ARK, this is mostly achieved by hitting stuff with other stuff and building new stuff from the stuff that falls out. During the day, they’re not so bad, and will simply shamble around, groaning, but at night they go nuts, running and climbing and being generally a lot more terrifying. Instead, it’s entirely similar to ARK, only instead of dinosaurs you’re faced with the reanimated dead. Hearing that it was published by Telltale was enough to get me interested, but I soon realised that this was simply backed by them financially and there’s nothing of their trademark charm, humour or storytelling in The Fun Pimps’ post-apocalyptic builder-gatherer. Nine times out of ten, mixing zombies into the batter ensures I’ll stay for the experience even if the game isn’t great, too, but there’s something about 7 Days to Die’s combination of surviving, crafting and shambling corpses that left me cold from the get-go and never warmed me up. Being a huge fan of survival sims in general, I’m usually able to look past a game’s flaws to the addictive challenge underneath and get stuck in wholeheartedly to gathering, crafting, monitoring vitals and fighting for my life.
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