I'll just put it like this: 7 Days to Die is like Minecraft but with guns and lots of zombies. Really, that's what it boils down to. Which is perfectly fine with me, considering how much I've enjoyed my time with 7 Days to Die. Building defences with friends and huddling in the corner hoping no zombies get through can be great fun. But what keeps bringing me back to the game is the TNT.
Watching things explode is always great, especially when you can watch every little block of a house slowly fall to the ground as in-game gravity finally takes its hold.
That's more than I can say for 7 Days To Die. It's way more expensive than both DayZ and Rust, and though it's craft-supported open world zombie survival sim, it's just not very impressive. If the idea of Early Access is to show off something that people might want to be part of and support, it just made me want to flee.
It's an ugly game, and not in the artistic way the apocalypse can be. It has bad textures stretched over bustable world blocks (a la Minecraft), terrible animation, and incredibly awkward action that feels like it's running twice as fast as it needs to. But I think the sound is the most off-putting part of the experience: a soundtrack that attempts to evoke the dread of being surrounded by the undead, but with all the restraint of a hungry zombie. Everything makes a weary zombie sound, and it can feel like things are near you even if you're alone. Worse still are the reactions from a zombie when you assault them: one punch elicits a groan; further strikes - and it takes many to put one down - will create the effect of hitting the button on a soundboard over and over, piling zombie squelches up. It has almost no immersion or sense of dread, and the world is full of oddly placed objects to loot. Why am I looting birds nest and air conditioning units?
If there's one thing it has going for it, it's that it leans heavily on crafting. The loot is everywhere, and your inventory enables you to combine objects to craft helpful items. It mostly makes sense, so if you place a pile of sticks in a line they become a club, or a fill out the sleeping bag template with cloth gives you something to place as a spawn point. In addition, every building can be barricaded by breaking down internal walls and filling doors and windows with those blocks. A multiplayer game I played at least had a little bit of ebb-and-flow to it as we tried to survive a zombie assaults by plugging the windows with broken down bits of the house. But after the tedious, flappy fighting against the witless AI, all I wanted to do was wall myself in.
So two out of three aren't bad, and in fact both show a huge amount of promise. It's impressive that DayZ and Rust are capable of offering different things within the same space: DayZ is more of a survivalist game, whereas Rust's messy timeline invokes hunter-gathering. DayZ is about the fall of civilisation; Rust, if it has a goal other than to survive, is about the creation of one. Both are strong foundations for the developers to build on, and both are good games right now. That's more than can be said for our third contender. Like one of its infected antagonists, 7 Days To Die shambles, groaning, at the back of the pack.
Is it worth playing right now?
DayZ: Yes
Rust: Yes, check out our Rust alpha review for more.
7 Days to Die: Nope, not yet.
http://www.pcgamer.c...-7-days-to-die/
