I've been with Project Zomboid for some time (at least since you had to download it from their website and there was just the demo). I have watched the game simply blossom over the years from what was a single seedling of genius into the true glory of its current state. I can only imagine, then, what it will end up being many years down the line. Project Zomboid is an extreme, over-head zombie survival game in a small city/large town in Kentucky. You find yourself in this world and must fight for survival on a daily basis. The game tells you straight-away that you will die, you simply cannot escape that fact. The question is, what kind of story will your last days be, and how long is that story?

PROS

+ Greatest survival aspects I have ever encountered in any game. Just for an example, you have to feed yourself. Certain foods satisfy your hunger more than others. Certain food requires refrigeration- lest it spoil- or cooking- lest you eat raw meat- in order to avoid illness. This is easy enough early on, but becomes a real challenge when the power runs out. Every day is a challenge and you have to really plan long-term in order to not starve to death. And this is just food. There is thirst, emotions come into play, how hot or cold you are, the game simply demand that you stay as healthy as possible. Because inevitably you will find yourself under attack by the dead, and you can't swing a nailed-baseball bat if you have a broken arm. Oh yeah, and if you catch a cold you're character starts to cough. Yeah.

+ Sound and sight are clearly defined in this game, which is thoroughly refreshing. By that I mean that the area your character can currently see is updated in-real time. The farther away something is or the darker it gets, the more obscured their vision of that area becomes. After you look away from something, the area doesn't immediately go to a blackened state, as your character remembers what was there, but that doesn't mean that he'll see a zombie coming from behind him. What he will do, however, is hear it, giving you a rough image at a shorter distance, but alerting you all the same (unless he's deaf!).

+ The combat system is sensational. Different weapons have different stats, of course, but there's a real give-and-take for everything. Knives, for instance, can be pretty much one-hit kills but require you to get in danger-close range. Baseball bats, on the other hand, offer longer range, but anyone who has ever played baseball knows that there's a sweet spot; choke the swing and you miss your potential, but the tip of the bat hardly gives you any power at all, and the game takes this into effect.

+ The crown jewel in all of this is the extent of customization of the parameters of the game. The game comes pre-loaded with what the devs consider "proper zombies", but they leave it up to you to tweek it at your desire. Want to play with Left 4 Dead zombies? Done. With a few clicks, the zeds run around everywhere, are super athletic, and horde like small schools of fish, but you are 100% immune to infection. Want to Walking Dead it? Sure! Zombies are extremely slow and stupid, will eventually degrade into nothingness, and have hordes thousands in number, but you are already infected and will succumb to a bite regardless of treatment or activity, and trust me when I say that it's a totally different game once you're infected.

+ Multiplayer. There are numerous servers with an all-around decent community. You can also play casually with your friends, it's all up to you.

+ Easily has some of the the best developers out there. They have clear-set goals, listen to their player base, offer reasonable timelines they stick to, and haven't wavered in all these years. I expect they'll stick with it for some time to come.

NEUTRALS

0 The game is still in early access. Lots of things you'd like to see simply aren't in the game yet and you'll have to wait. But that's early access for you.

0 No meaningful goal beyond surviving. This is fun and challenging in the beginning, but can become extremely repetative by "mid-game", and outright unbearable past a certain point. People will say, "you set your own goals" and that's absolutely true but, in my opinion, there desperately needs to be at least some offering of an end-game beyond death. It would certainly add spice, challenge, and variety to the game, though it isn't necessary.

0 The game inherently limits itself. I'll use guns to explain. Pistols and shotguns certainly exist in this game, but I have to tell you that I have only ever used a gun once, and that was to go out in a blaze of glory once I'd already been infected. Because they're so loud, using them is simply a death sentence in the overwhelming majority of scenarios; my friends and I simply cannot come up with a reason on an average day where you would use a gun at all. By that reasoning, it's impossible to truly appreciate this game. As another example, I have never once fished in this game. If the goal of the game is purely to survive, why leave your fort if you don't need to?

CONS

- It takes SO LONG for CRUCIAL updates. As I've said, I absolutely understand that it's early access and in development, but Christ on a cross it took so long to introduce basic things. The one downside to the developers is their limited ability to actually implement the things they want to do. Vehicles, for instance, are only a recent addition. Who knows how long anything might take?

- No NPC survivors. At one point in the past they did, in fact, exist, but they were pulled by the devs. While I agree with that decision (the NPCs were total garbo) the game desperately needs them, and single player is thoroughly empty without them. Their creation is by far the greatest challenge to the devs, but they have simply introduced no timeline whatsoever. Some will say that this is overcome because of multiplayer, but I totally disagree.

- Effectively one map. They regularly update it and, as I've alluded to before, you'll never see the whole thing. While you are randomly spawned every time you create a character, you will inevitably develop a preferred spot that you find every single time, because you know exactly how to get back there from almost any location.

TL;DR/CONCLUSION

This is by far one of the greatest games I've ever played. It has so far lived up to every bit of potential if was capable of, and it's still in early access. You simply can't lose with Project Zomboid.

Well, I mean... you can. And you will. You will die. PZ doesn't offer a happy ending, it offers you a good story. This isn't how you lived.

This is how you died.

9/10, would drink bleach to escape being eaten alive again.