Just like Verdun, 7 Days to Die came to consoles from PC this year. After a successful early access release on Steam that saw competition with other zombie survival games like DayZ, the Fun Pimps’ game came to the next generation of consoles through the publishing power of Telltale. How good is the game on console, though?
7 Days to Die is an interesting game. It is an open-world game where the player must scavenge and find or build shelter to survive a harsh world of zombies, dogs, bears, and other players. During the daytime, it is all about exploring and searching for food, water and other resources, such as weapons and tools.
When night falls, though, the game becomes all the more sinister. Now, zombies can run and that makes a huge different. At that point, leaving the safety of shelter becomes very dangerous. You can no longer outrun the zombies and you find yourself cowering, looking out in every direction from the safety of your torchlight. Is that a zombie over there? Is that a bear or a boar barely lit on the horizon? The eye that is your awareness marker will creep open. ‘Sensed’. Oh boy. Where from? Who? You’re too scared to go and find them and so you’re just waiting. Waiting. Then BAM!
But if you thought that was hard, wait until the end of the week. At midnight, every 7 days, there is a ‘blood moon’. That night, the moon is huge and red and the zombies come in a giant horde to find you, which they do very quickly, break in and then kill you. It gives you a goal for the entire week to make sure that you are ready to fight and survive.
There are definitely issues with the game. There is a problem with lag and that can happen whether you are online or not. Single player, online multiplayer and offline multiplayer all suffer from lag issues, especially when the game autosaves. The framerate can drop massively, especially if there are a lot of zombies around and the graphics are bland, similar to the flat graphics of the Walking Dead: Survival Instinct.
The zombies do not have much variety either and so many look the same that Navezgane before the bombs fell must have been a nightmare. You’ll get zombie lumberjacks in the snow, nurses and fat, vomiting policemen who also all look the same and a few other zombie skins which are all the same.
And through it all, 7 Days to Die is an entertaining game. The building is a very strong addition, making it a strange survival version of Minecraft and its offline co-operative mode is nice to see as that mode dies out elsewhere. Then there is the pure difficulty of it. If you find a screamer, a little girl pulled straight from the horror genre cliché book, the hordes it calls can be a real pain to fight off. A bear will end you unless you have a gun. You can bleed to death or starve or die of thirst.
On my very first playthrough, I took shelter in a cabin in the snow. One day passed and a bear broke down the door and forced me out. Trying to take it back saw me die more times than I care to remember. I was evicted by a bear, losing everything I had. It was infuriating and frustrating but it was brilliant.
So, if you enjoy zombie survival games, 7 Days to Die would be worth playing. There are very real issues, both technical and graphical, and the gameplay and performance are far from perfect. However, it is still a wonderfully exciting and entertaining game and there is nothing in gaming more satisfying than popping a zombie’s head with a sledgehammer.
Trust me, ye?
*All images are of PC graphics from the press kit.
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