Okay so it turns out I found a little bit of down time during Christmas to write up a review, i was just hanging around the house and decided to play something i could just pause or save easily incase I was needed, so I decided to load up 7 Days To Die, when it was first released i was pretty impressed with this game, while the PvP was sort of light and the game was kind of buggy, it was extremely enjoyable as an actual zombie survival game where the PvE world was a massive hazard and as the days went on the harder it became, so I thought, screw it, even though the game is dwindling down i may as well review it anyway.
So lets dive into 7 Days to Die and have a look at arguably the best Zombie Survival game that hit the market during the surge.
Setting.
7 Days to Die takes place in an apocalyptic earth where a zombie virus has killed off most of humanity, survivors arrive at the edge of maps and have to do whatever it takes to survive, this includes scavenging all over the fairly big map, but there's a catch, Zombies are everywhere, there's other survivors to worry about and food and drink are a necessity, starting with basically nothing but a bandage and a few food items, you're going to need to scavenge absolutely everything from around the map while avoiding zombies and building up your own base.
However as time goes on, you may get a little bit stronger the zombie hordes become bigger and more violent until eventually hundreds of zombies may show up on your doorstep and if you aren't prepared to defend your home, you're going to die a gruesome death and most of your supplies you've saved will be destroyed as the zombies ravage through your house destroying it without a second thought.
7 Days is a lot easier with friends, however the more people on a server, the more zombies there are, and the more people in one area the bigger the hordes become when they come for you, as time passes the server will begin to fill with zombies until it get's to a point where it may almost be impossible to defend against them, but that's just a part of the fun of 7 Days to Die, and the harder it gets, the better.
So lets take a look at what goes into making up 7 Days to Die.
Scavenging and Looting.
Looting is the main source of equipment in 7 Days, you'll need to scavenge destroyed towns, farm minerals, animals and even steal from other players, the towns in 7 Days are rather large depending on where you go, and can sometimes take hours to properly look while avoiding zombies and other players, nearly all weapon blueprints in the game come directly from looting towns, sometimes you may even be lucky enough to find a left over gun from it's previous owner, like most survival games ammo must also be found to use weapons and they can sometimes be rarer than the actual guns.
Likewise, armor blueprints are acquired through looting towns and will require you to hunt animals to make them, but the looting system has one big draw back, sure you might get a lot of great loot, but if you stay too long, or go out after nightfall, you're gonna attract zombies, sometimes you'll attract so many you may even have to just camp out overnight, lest you draw them back to your base and lose everything, different towns have different amounts of loot, with small towns and houses having some loot, while massive towns have a lot of great loot, but it all comes down to how much you're willing to risk for it.
Crafting
Crafting plays a massive role in 7 Days, you need to craft basically everything in the game, from your own food, right up to assault rifles and massive steel doors for your base, likewise your base is fully constructed by you and then upgraded as supplies become more readily available, for the first 7 days you'll be happy to maybe get a big enough base with a furnace, cooking pit and some torches and then upgrade to reinforced wood, but as the zombie hordes get stronger those small fortifications won't stop anything.
You can upgrade pretty heavily in 7 Days, going from simple wood to concrete, to reinforced rebar all the way up to reinforced steel that will take zombies ages to break down, however reinforced steel can take a lot of time, more time than you have sometimes and you'll have to divvy up your loot between surviving and building which can sometimes leave you lacking in other areas such as weapons and base defenses.
Speaking of base defenses, as the world in 7 Days can be destroyed, most people will dig deep into the earth their first few weeks and set up a cave base before they have enough supplies to build on the surface, when you do though you'll need to build defenses to fight off the zombie hordes, spike pits, traps, barbed wire and even trip mines can be used to secure your base, but like everything in this game it'll have to be built from scratch and repeated use will see you repairing it during the day time.
Crafting is an essential part of 7 Days to Die and needs to be done properly, as loot only respawns every so often, not making the best of your situation can often lead to death and having to start over again, you will also need to go out and explore every now and then to acquire certain materials like clay, stone, iron, wood even things like twigs and grass, they all have a use in 7 Days to die and you will be surprised just how many supplies can going into making one thing(damn you submarine doors!).
Zombies, Everywhere.
What sets 7 Days apart from other survival games is the dedicated PvE system, zombies are numerous and can skyrocket as time goes on, going from beating a few zombies with a spiked club to unending bullets being fired at zombie hordes comes pretty quickly and you need to be prepared for it or you will die and lose everything, at the start the zombies in 7 days weren't the best, they were rather glitchy and would often magically follow you even when they couldn't see you, thankfully they've changed now and the AI has gotten a lot better and terms of hordes.
Zombies in 7 days are also pretty powerful for some reason, a zombie horde can destroy a small base in a matter of seconds and as time goes on they can destroy entire towns if given a reason to, they range from everyday normal zombies, to infected dogs, weird flying hornets and massive tank zombies that can withstand an entire magazine before finally going down, they also have a keen sense of smell and hearing, carrying things like fresh meat will attract them and making noise even in your own base will eventually attract them if they're close enough, the same goes for shooting zombies which is a catch 22 when you're facing down a horde destroying base.
Zombie hordes have changed over the lifetime of the game, before they were slow, only moving faster at night and were relatively easy to kill, now however, the zombie hordes are fast and numerous and will actively target bases where survivors are and try and kill them by destroying their bases from the ground up, the PvE aspect of unending zombie hordes however makes for an extremely fun experience, especially when you're with a team of friends.
Critical Review and Reception.
As the title says, this game should of won the survival genre when the market was being flooded when Rust became a huge phenomenon, it had all the aspects that the other games dropped the ball on, admittedly the PvP was never really big in 7 days to die, but it had more than enough of it to keep people interested, what 7 days really excels in is amazing PvE content where the harder the game is the better it ultimately becomes, starting small from a wooden shack and upgrading into a massive steel fortress and fending off hordes of zombies.
The developers have stuck it out with 7 days to die though, adding numerous content through patches and fixing problems that the community has complained about, removing unwanted and undesirable mechanics and instead replacing them with quality of life changes such as vehicles and easier crafting mechanics, all though some things that remain the some such as the high quality crafting and looting buildings, but ultimately they were never really bad things to begin with and now with the new zombie hordes they actually add depth to the game.
While not a game for everyone, 7 Days To Die is a hardcore PvE survival game with PvP elements thrown in there, if you're thinking of getting in and running around killing people, you might want to skip this one, but if you want a hardcore PvE survival that progressively gets harder the longer you survive, this might be right up your alley.
