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What can you buy for €30 that will give you the greatest return on satisfaction? Two newly released DVDs? A solid mainstream game that’s been out a few months? A decent meal for one? Or… an unfinished, buggy zombie game ported dreadfully from PC that looks like it was made in the late 90s? Ironically, there is a pretty effective zombie game buried beneath the glitchy rubble of ‘7 Days to Die’, but one that literally cannot be appreciated to any extent.
To begin, the game drops you into a huge post-apocalyptic version of Arizona. You possess no equipment of any kind, not even clothes on your back. Materials have to be gathered, sorted, and refined in order to build progressively more advanced equipment. Other than a short tutorial which explains how the crafting system works and gets you to make some basic gear, how you play is left entirely up to you. The objective is to survive as long as possible, in whatever way the player sees fit. Some may wish to fortify a small area with as much barbed wire, booby traps, and shutters as you can muster in an attempt to to wait it out. Others may prefer to become nomads and wander the world. In addition to other factors such as health, hunger, tiredness, and fatigue must also be monitored. Zombies are slow, shambling creatures by day and fast, lethal killers by night, becoming incredibly powerful in a weekly blood moon. So far, so good, right…?
Wrong. Absolutely none of the promising aforementioned features can be truly appreciated. The world look like a fairly poor Playstation 2 game. Glitches are shamelessly numerous. From zombies suddenly sprouting invisible wings and flying around in the air, to your character getting stuck on random patches of ground, the game is ridiculously buggy. The inventory and crafting menus are unusually difficult to navigate. This is particularly irritating because the game doesn’t pause while accessing them. This is presumably to mimic crafting stuff on the fly, which is a good, yet poorly implemented idea. To make matters worse, a cursor is used to navigate the crafting menu. This made sense on PC but is incredibly annoying with a thumbstick – a sign of how ill thought out the port was. The frame rate drops repeatedly and the entire game occasionally freezes; a complete mystery considering we’re talking about a basic engine with terrible graphics. The volume cuts up and down randomly, failing to create any sort of atmosphere. Most unforgivably of all, the combat is the worst I’ve ever seen in this kind of game. The animations are incredibly basic (leisurely swinging an axe forward towards a stampeding zombie with no obvious signs of exertion? Really?) and there is just no kind of tension or excitement. Firing a shotgun might as well be tossing a pebble. In a nutshell, the combat is unrealistic and incredibly boring.
The sheer volume of technical flaws makes it genuinely impossible to recommend buying ‘7 Days to Die’. It’s unfortunate, as the idea and vision behind it rival some of the current undead bigshots and could have made it the frontrunner of a successful indie franchise. Instead, this hideous, glitchy labyrinth is just a complete mess. A terrified scavenger sprinting away from hordes of undead could knock together a better game than this.
Reviewed on Xbox One.
