Recent reviews by Drum

Almost a month after release and no major patches.

Game is almost unplayable if you are, like me, a fan of the immersion these kinds of games provide. Both the micro and macro management are messed up a big way. There are many few little things/bugs that either happen too often or just break the immersion of the game. There are no clear clues about how import/export work. I don't feel like i'm doing anything "useful" to help my city grow.

Finally, as a developer my self i'm pretty upset about the release of a clearly unfinished product at an AAA price point (not considering the ultimate edition at 90!). Do not buy it even for the christmas holiday EVEN if a major patch is release by then, it's just gonna be a bait. Show the management how game dev should work.

I've been playing this game for quite a while both in co-op and in solo (offline) and I absolutely enjoyed them both!

Once you start the game throws you in the literal middle of nowhere, telling you to start building the very basics tool you'll need to survive at least for the first night. After you've been brought to the first quest giver the tantrum of the game is pretty much self-explanatory: You can do everything you imagine in this huge open world game.

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The levelling system, tied with the harvesting/crafting tools progression, helps the game keep its balance even after hundreds of hours. There are many tiers for every kind of tool, ranging from the very simple axe that can eventually become a very nice chainsaw that you can use to salute your fellow undeads friends, to the hammer to build things that can turn into a nail gun! The best part about this is that it's thought in a way that you can even loot or buy higher quality tools right before accessing them via crafting system, giving a rewarding sense of deserved peace and progression in the game.

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Once every 7 (by default) days a very unpleasant huge family of brain-eating bros will be coming for you. You cannot hide, they'll try to get to you wherever you are. The best hope you have is to be prepared, fortified and with a decent amount of weapons/ammo if you are going to fight through the night. You can also choose not to fight, hoping the zombies wont completely overrun the foundation of your base, causing it to collapse on itself (yeah, that happened to me, f you zs).

After a while into the game you'll learn how to properly fortify your base, put down every kind of traps (electric fence <3) and turrets and just enjoy the slaughter.

Be cautios tho, I've noticed that, even in that case, you may never know how well prepared you are... so watch out, ammo depletes fast!

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Quest givers and their shops are super useful when you need to unload some loot you don't need anymore (even if after a while they'll stop buying some particular things if you keep selling them and you'll have to wait till the next restock). You may also get very lucky and find very decent gear or recipes you don't know yet for a discounted price! Most of their camps also include forges and all the other useful crafting stations you may find difficult to obtain early in the game, that's why I'd strongly suggest to start your first base near on of these camps. Keep in mind that they have an undestructible area around them so keep far from that, you'll start to hate QUICKLY the sound made by struck indestructible objects.

As for the quests, they are a bit repetitive but, once you get the drill, they are really easy to accomplish. They range from the classic "find and recovery an object" to the "clear an entire building here". Not too much variety here, but their completion is necessary if you want to access higher level quests and get a marker for the next level quest giver.

For the npcs themselves, they have a name and that's pretty much it, not a lot of lore involved for now.

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Well. Crafting. You can basically craft everything you see while you are walking. The amount of recipes and items to be crafted is astounding and you'll often find yourself in need of adding yet another furnace to speed up the melting process to get that iron for that thing and then the other and then... AAAAARGH. The crafting system is simple yet very effective, you can queue up items to craft and you can craft stuff even while you're walking. You can delegate crafting to your crafting stations, smelting to the smelting stations, and so on. Timings for the craftings to be completed are balanced. Knowing that the iron you just finished collecting in the cave right below your base is being smelted into bars while you continue digging makes you feel less afraid of the whole cavern collapsing on your head :D

When it comes to base building, you'll unlock very quickly tools that allow you to build/upgrade the basic foundation blocks at a decent velocity so you don't have to hate your life and the game so, just be patient, you'll be rewarded. Other than this, knowing that the base building is some kind of "minecraft" style makes you realize that the only limit in what you can create is literally the sky (not joking, you can build up to there even with very limited immagination). For each foundational block you also have different shapes (like, A LOT of different shapes) to further customize that little cubic iron can of yours :D

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Ah, the maps. One word? Huge.
7 days to die is a bit different from the other games on this: the maps are procedurally generated, which means that they are filled with random-but-probable-for-that-biome/place stuff. There's an exception: Navezgame (which is also the map i've spent the more time in). Navezgame is a partially hand-curated huge map with all the biomes and plenty of resources and spots to base build. The building types and cities spawns are all so different and all serve different purposes (e.g. you'll find a loat of coal inside a mine building) so you'll never really run out of things to do or places to explore. All the POIs, then, offer a reward at the "end" of them (all the buildings are built like mazes where you have multiple ways in and multiple ways out, with a treasure if you follow the proper path to the end).

The painful aspect of this is travelling, the downside of general generated roads is that the connections may seem... "off" sometimes.. to say the least. You'll often find roads starting or finishing in the middle of nowhere, or maybe disconnected in a way that doesn't makes sense. That kills realism a bit for me but you get used to it.

Once you acquire your first motorized vehicles you'll start appreciating the trips that you used to hate to get from point A to point B.

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For the final note I wanted to talk about the multiplayer part, which is exactly the same as the single player one except there's pvp enabled and you can help/kill each other. If you group together with friends you can even share quests, bases and map POIs! The fun really never ends while you're playing this title with a friend (especially during a horde night after 40-50 days when you are geared enough to start fighting back those brainless meat-eaters!)

If you find the game too difficult for yourself or your group you can adjust basically EVERY MAJOR AND MINOR GAME SETTING: from the day/night cycle duration, to the speed of the zs during night, their number during horde nights and so on... You'll surely find the best settings suited for you and your friends.

For the customization/extensibility part I'll just say that there's a fully fledged map editor INSIDE the game that you can use to create (from scratch or from a random generated map) and share your map/creations with the community, it's insane!

The level of content and quality this title already has makes me wonder if it will ever come out of alpha, for 20$ it's a literal steal.

Have fun and kill a lot of zombies guys! :D

Il gioco è veramente enorme e io dopo 60 ore di gioco non ho ancora cominciato a grattarne la superficie..
Lo consiglio! :)