7 Days To Die review

Imagine if Minecraft and Resident Evil had a child...but the mom was slightly drunk during a lot of her pregnancy. But it’s alright because doctors are working around the clock to make the baby stop randomly lagging and crashing!
7 Days To Die is a game that is still in alpha and has loads of potential. The general idea is you need to collect supplies to survive, while fending off the zombies. It’s your standard block building game, but with a more realistic feel to it. The ground twists and warps as it takes damage, making sure it’s not just a block with some damage, so the terrain can be very uneven. As higher tier blocks take damage, they begin to show signs of wear and tear. Get guns, or any melee weapon you can, and do your best to survive for as long as possible.
For starters, the game is a lot like minecraft where there’s no real objective besides survive. That being said, there’s a lot to survival. You can freeze to death, you can get heat stroke and die, you can starve, die of dehydration, even infection from your favorite undead friends.
Of course the only thing worse than death is a broken leg. Moving quite a bit slower, you’re an easy target for getting swarmed. Now of course you can bandage it, so you move a bit faster, but one wrong step and you’ll rebreak it. Broken legs also take a long time to heal, about two hours play time. Also there’s a fifty-fifty chance a zombie will stun you when they get a hit in, meaning you move like a snail.
You have your standard health and stamina, and there are plenty of conditions to mess with those as well. Dysentery, and your stamina regen will be cut in half. You get that wonderful treat by drinking unpurified water. Food poisoning from eating things you obviously shouldn’t eat. Your stamina drains extremely fast, but lucky for you neither ailment last very long. Of course, bleeding out is dreadful to say the least. Watch your health slowly tick away. Hopefully you either have or get to a bandage in time to stop it.
Get wet, and your temperature drops. This can be a good counter for heat stroke, but bad because it can make you freeze if it’s cold out enough. Feel free to warm yourself up by the fire or put on better clothes. Maybe if you loot around the city you’ll find something. Also if you get infected, you’ll randomly die within a two hour timespan. Take some pills to feel better or prepare for the worst.
So that’s the first dunk into 7DTD.
Now personally this game is rather addictive. It has numerous difficulty options for those of us who are completionist masochists. Number of zombies that spawn, their overall stats, their aggressiveness, if they run during daylight or not, you name it. I’m going to start off with the things I love, followed by things that...need work. Now the game takes a while for you to build up a massive fort and give the zombies the middle finger.
First off: The good.
Player roles. It’s an RPG based system where you have stats. Think of it like Skyrim. You have skills you can raise by doing things that affect them, and when you get enough XP, you get points to dump into skills or use them to unlock skills you don’t start with access to. They even have a decent perk list where there’s like multiple tiers to get. You can be the person who’s beast at combat, scavenging, medic or crafting to name just a few. I mean there’s a whole slew of fun stuff to choose!
Combat can get a little annoying, but take it as you will. A zombie runs up and goes all Mike Tyson on your unfortunate ass. There’s a good chance they’ll run around you a few times before taking a swing. That can get very annoying, as you spin in circles, trying to nail your assailant. However, hit them in the leg and they go down to a knee, or even fall backwards. A hit to the head gives you a high chance to stun. Shots to the head have a decent chance to decapitate, but for balance reasons it’s not terribly high.
Speaking of combat, you get your choices between melee, guns, bows and explosives. For explosives, you can make pipe bombs, sticks of dynamite, tnt or gas barrels. Pipe bombs do a lot of entity damage and almost zero block damage. Sticks of dynamite are good for tearing up the terrain, but don’t have a big radius. Still do decent damage to zombies though. The two previous explosives are lit and thrown. However you can just throw them and they can be detonated by secondary explosives later. TNT can be placed but is only activated by damage, so it’s as close to C4 as you’re going to get. Gas barrels work the same way except they have to be set on the ground or they’ll fall.
Bows are simply a bow and arrow or crossbows. They’re awesome since you can get the resources to make them easily. They each have three different tiers of arrows, with a special arrow. The bow can have flame arrows for lighting zombies on fire obviously (there’s no open flame in this game so no burning down houses or forests) and the crossbow gets explosive bolts, which are amazing for killing off hordes, but take a lot of resources.
Guns are your basic five categories: assault rifles, SMGs, sniper rifles, shotguns and pistols. There’s basically one gun in each category, except for the hunting rifle which is good for one powerful shot before having to reload; no they don’t have a scope, only sniper rifles do. Melee is a bit restricted. You choose from varying types of clubs, a machete (which you can only scavenge so far) or a knife (either made from bone or actual metal). Knives are best for getting the hide off an animal but don’t do much damage, machetes are good for headshots due to having a high decapitation rate and are decent at skinning, and clubs just generally swing slowly but do a lot of reliable damage.
The game has decent physics, as every block has its own weight and load capacity. And yes, the zombies will break through blocks to punch you in the face. While making a suspended structure in the air seems like a good idea, all it takes is a zombie breaking the right support beams and everything you have will collapse.
The crafting system is deeeeeep. When you first start playing, you see a lot of junk. As you become more familiar with the recipes, almost everything has a purpose, giving you a sense of veterancy. Corn? Pssh, barely fills you up, takes forever because you have to eat one at a time, useless right? You can actually take corn and turn it into corn meal. You take cornmeal and turn it into grain alcohol. If you drink the alcohol, your stamina will be supercharged for a bit, allowing you enough to outrun the zombies or traverse across land rapidly. You also use grain alcohol to turn biofuel into gasoline to power your minibike or chainsaw. Alcohol is also used in various medical equipment.
They spent a lot of time on details. So quick lesson in motor vehicles. Your battery by itself won’t last long (We’re talking real life alright?) but your vehicle uses some of the energy generated from driving to recharge your battery, this part is called the alternator. In 7DTD, if you park your minibike, you can keep the headlight on. If you do so, it will gradually drain the battery. If the battery dies, you’ll have to replace it, there’s currently no way to jump it. However, if it’s low, you just have to keep driving and it will slowly recharge itself. That’s a lot of detail! They also spent a lot of time making the zombies look scary. If you play the game long enough and admire all the details they put in, you can tell this game has tons of potential.
Minibikes are the way to travel. They have a small basket you can find and attach for extra storage. They’re fast, and only need gas to run. Also you can run zombies over with them. However they do take a lot of resources. And no you can’t just stumble across one...not to my knowledge anyway. Once again, if your bike takes too much damage, you’ll have to replace something. When your tires go, you actually see the fact that you have no tires. They could have just left it out, but they didn’t.
Also low tier wood blocks, often have this creepy abandoned vibe to them, cobwebs included. So when you stumble across old wooden houses, they look ominous as hell! Way to pay homage to the classics!
By the way, torches stop zombies from spawning, but the light attracts them from a distance...so does sound. So while guns are the way to go, be prepared to fight off a small horde every time you pop off a round. Ammo can be annoying to make, because you have to have bullet casings for bullets (go figure), and brass is the only way to get that. You have to scrounge around for it and it’s not extremely common.
So they did a good job of weapon balance. Make sure you have a melee weapon and I’d recommend not using bullets unless you’re A: A straight badass or B: Fighting off the horde. Speaking of the horde…
Every 7 days, the horde comes. They come for YOU, and they won’t stop unless you kill them all. Your first night is going to be rough, you’ll probably die. Your inability to have the resources to make a decent fort is an extreme hindrance, because you’ll probably spend a lot of your time scavenging for survival supplies. I tend to use my wood and iron to sew up weak spots in premade structures for the first horde.
Yes, you can eventually get a base to a point where you don’t have to leave, but it will be a long time. Making a place that grows all your resources? Not terribly hard. Making a place that can grow all your resource and can resist the most brutal of zombie hordes? Not even remotely as easy.

Now for the bad.
The game IS in alpha, and there’s loads of potential. A quick glance around and you’ll see how much effort they put into some areas of the game. As far as alpha goes, there’s random second intervals of lag, which happen about every...I want to say ten to twenty seconds, just enough to throw off your shot. The game does crash decently, but not as bad as it used to (thank god for the last patch). Also there’s this annoying thing where it doesn’t update my map with what I’ve explored since my last save.
Death...isn’t a terrible concern. It honestly depends on your settings. You can set it to delete everything on you, just drop the stuff in your taskbar, or just drop whatever was in your backpack. When respawning, you better have made a bedroll to respawn on or you’re going to be somewhere random on the map. That being said, it has a marker on your map of your last death location. If you die again before reaching it, your stuff will still be there, but the marker of where it is, won’t be. Have fun!
But seriously though, while getting my stuff deleted is way too infuriating to turn on, death needs to be a bigger deal. One of my suggestions is that wellness goes a lot lower. Your wellness goes back to 0 at death...and it resets your starvation and thirst bars. So there are times where dying is fine because you don’t have to worry about food or water. Honestly, make death keep lowering your wellness until eventually you have like...ten hitpoints. So it becomes a balance if death is worth the wellness loss. At the moment, death is annoying but you quickly get your stuff back and return to not caring.
Second thing related to death: wellness. Taking vitamins, eating meat and honey, will all raise your wellness. As your wellness goes up, so do your max stamina and health. However there are limits to how far it will go. My friend and I just got used to having low health, it wasn’t a huge concern.
There are still tiny bugs, like farming is annoying and sometimes the game thinks you’re trying to punch what is below you, instead of what you’re aiming at. It also takes a few seconds to update highlighting the block you’re looking at when you go to plant a seed.
Things to work on/ideas:
This is a combination for both “This isn’t bad, but it needs to be fixed” and “It would be so cool if you added *this*!” I understand the company has priorities; I’m just pointing things out. For now, the company is focusing on fixing bugs. There were a lot, and there are still occasional glitches, but it’s a lot better now. In my opinion, the game is worth the cost.
Your wellness should go even lower. Surviving at 70 max hitpoints wasn’t too big of a deal. Now if it went down to let’s say 35? I’d be terrified of combat. As I said before, make it go way lower, or make it a difficulty option. I LOVE more options! It allows everyone to get what they want! Literally, make a wellness option for how far it can go.
Survival is decently easy. Zombies bring you goodies when you loot them, and eating moldy sandwiches isn’t that big of a deal, which most zombies drop. My stamina deteriorates quickly? Okay well I’m not leaving my base anytime soon so I’ll just wait the 30 seconds for it to wear off. Same with dysentery, I was fine with drinking unfiltered water and eating old food/rotting flesh. How about the effect stacks? So you may risk eating one, just to live, but it can’t be a permanent solution. Or what if it slowly turns into a worse disease if it stacks enough, where you start losing health?
Zombie infection: should turn your old body into a feral (boss zombie). Also two hours is not a big deal. I mean early game? Yeah, infection sucks, but wait for an airdrop and take some antibiotics from it and it’s gone. You simply die of infection when it happens.
Ferals need to be...changed. They have a stupid amount of hitpoints! So ferals are these big jerks who are fast, mean, and take forever to kill. Two things can happen: A: a feral finds you and you have no shelter and it kills you over time like when you run out of stamina, or B: you trap it somewhere and beat on it from a distance until it dies, making its hit points unnecessarily high because you’re either going to kill it eventually one way or the other, or you can’t get away and it eats your face. Give them like 25% of their current health, which is still a lot, but make them do more damage and can climb like crawlers. Now they’re not just a bag of hitpoints and can do scary amounts of damage and are terrifying. Crawlers can climb, but can’t do damage to blocks while they’re climbing. Make ferals able to climb, then start busting down blocks when they can’t go anywhere, so they can let other ferals or crawlers in. Boom, you just metaphorically and literally poked a big hole in my defenses.
Zombies need to attack from above better. They occasionally get a hit on what’s below them, but it’s unlikely. The horde can sit above you for a while before doing anything. My friend and I built a base in a cave, which is extremely effective. You have a heavily defended front, and you can go outside and kill the ones above you. We even built a sniper tower about twenty blocks away that’s connected to an underground tunnel, so we can shoot above our base without exposing ourselves. The base of the sniper tower is protected by the front of our base, so it's very defensible.
Zombies need more...what’s the word...horror movie stuff? Like if there’s a zombie on the other side of a block, it should be able to grab you if it’s close, and you’re forced to press like...F or something to break free, which uses 10 stamina. I honestly feel like combat is a bit too static. The fun is when you’re running for your life from them, or they’re breaking through your pitiful shelter. Otherwise...eh. I mean maybe them grabbing you isn’t the right solution, but something needs to change so there's more to shelter combat.
Some extra dramatic effects would be cool. For instance when something is beating on the other side of a block from you, there should be a small puff of dust that comes off, same with explosions. Maybe zombies can have a bloody bullet hole from where you shoot them as well or an arrow sticking out if you nailed them with one? How about a zombie doing extra damage if they get a running start? A zombie suddenly bursting through a weakened wall or door would be terrifying!
I’m sure this is in the to-be-added pile, but upgradable vehicles. A multiperson car would be cool. Hell let me toss some type of plow on the front to mow down zombies at the cost of more fuel consumption from the weight. Even consider giving me the ability to put in a better engine to increase my horse power. Would be cool to have a slow, but heavily armored car to mow down zombies in, then have a faster one that’s more for getaway/transportation but has lower armor. Hell let me shoot from the vehicle as well. Add in the option to make a sunroof that we can shoot from, but zombies can jump on and swipe at you while you sit on the inside. Car could take damage where the wheels are, making it pull in that direction if it gets bad enough. Just some fun ideas. Regardless, give me balancing options, not just better upgrades.
A big city to explore would be cool. They have your typical small town that they put a lot of detail into. I’d love full-on ten story buildings to explore.
Let me make and power lights with electricity please. The giant spotlights are obnoxious, but too many torches and the area starts to lag. Give us the ability to make a gas powered generator and some wires to hook up to...well anything. Would be cool if we had portable battery packs for drills and whatnot. Electric fence? Hell yes. But for us snobs who like to have a classy feel to our base once it’s been badassitized, I’d like normal ceiling lights.
Please put in a wider selection of zombies, especially ones that make your base easier to destroy later in the game. Right now you got your standard zombies: crawlers, fast zombies, slow zombies, normal zombies. Then you got your special zombies: ferals (lots of health) screamers (attract more zombies) climbers/crawlers (They can climb walls and ambush you , and have decent health) and cops (spit acid that eats through stuff and they can explode).
Here’s two ideas for more specials: Stalkers (Attack fast and move rapidly but are only attracted to sound and only spawn at night) berserkers/devastators (are slow but do extra damage to blocks)
Final thoughts
Get this game immediately. I have a feeling it’s going to be the best zombie survival game to date. There are little clues they may or may not have intentionally left. For instance the hazmat does nothing to shield you from the radiation zone. There’s also no point in going out there (the barren place with the greenish rocks on the ground) it’s the map border. So why have hazmat gear that does nothing? It actually does increase your radiation resistance. I think they have plans for it later.
Also the only vehicle is the one-person minibike. It clearly says in its stats that the total seats are equal to 1. Makes me feel like they plan to add more vehicles. My friend and I made an amazing base that we rarely have to repair. We got bored and started a new map on the hardest difficulty settings and wow the game picked up. We’re still learning as time goes on. Almost anything is usable or can be broken down into some type of useful salvage. Right now, I’m still building a colossal base that I never have to leave and is highly defensible. I think at some point they’re gonna add in harder/more zombies so I’d like to be prepared.
This game is addictive and I can’t wait to see where it goes. I’ve been playing it almost every day for about a month or two straight now.