7 days to die (or live, depending on your performance)

~ Author: Jacob Bullard

7 Days to Die (7DTD) is a First-Person RPG survival crafting game set in a post-apocalyptic world of Navezgane made by “The Fun Pimps”. Another early access survival crafting game? Yeah. First coming to steam in 2013 7DTD was an incredibly rough game that was mostly passed over for more popular titles. Over the years I’ve kept an eye on it and finally revisited it over the summer to see where it’s gotten. It has come a very long way in my eyes, but does it hold up to today’s standards after playing so many highly produced games of it’s type? I’m rather torn when it comes to this game and like all my reviews I believe you should form your own opinion after playing for yourself. With many redeeming and condemning factors I will try to persuade you into giving it a shot, and seeing if you can grapple with only seven days to die!

Despite the title of the game there’s way more than seven days to die. For the first six days you explore, kill zombies, (editor’s note: Sometimes Zombies kill you instead.) Loot buildings, build and reinforce your base, craft equipment, and complete missions from traders. On the night of the seventh day the sky turns blood red, a thick haze covers the world, and the hordes of the dead come to tear you and your base to pieces. With all your preparation you can survive, but be ready for a decently difficult fight if you don’t know what you’re doing. Which will be incredibly likely. Now let’s say you didn’t become a dead man’s dinner, you’ll find that the day counter on the top of your screen keeps going. And it won’t stop going, with every seven days a new and more diverse and deadly horde will come to make you into a human hummus!

The core gameplay is a pretty simple loop, you search, kill, loot, craft, repeat. Each building you search has its own quirks like traps and zombies hiding in closets, along with hidden stashes and special materials ready to be broken down for sweet sweet resources. You can also pick up quests from traders on the map that will make you snag some supplies, clear an area, or go digging for buried treasure! After looting you can build in a minecraft-esque block system and make better gear to improve your pungent-posse-purging projectiles. While building you’ll realize you can only upgrade certain things so far, only be able to craft the first level of weapons, and only make box mac and cheese instead of homemade! What to do? Same as in real life! Read a book, learn a thing!

When civilization has collapsed, Gordon Ramsay is in hell’s kitchen, and the only thing within a mile radius is a tin of uncooked SPAM you’ll start to crave some actual cooking. When your gun starts to become more of a deterrent to the undead instead of a solution, you’ll need to upgrade your arsenal. Well for a small base requirement of being LITERATE you can learn all of the knowledge you need! From magazines. (Trust me everything printed in magazines has to be true!) You can find or trade for these magazines across the wasteland to help improve your understanding of crafting and survival. Giving you new recipes or stat buffs that last forever! Some of the recipes can’t be unlocked with simple magazines though, they need to be unlocked with skill points that you get from all that sweet XP you’ll be racking up in your terrifying travels.

After hours of crafting, killing, and cooking you will find yourself with some skill points that you can invest in your stats! Some light RPG elements to make your character unique! Sledgehammers? Spears? Machine Guns? Automatic Turrets? The knowledge and skill can be yours with the click of a few buttons! (Who needs training and practice?) Investing into different skills and stats can teach you a plethora of useful ways to decimate the dearly departed. Or how to make a machine to do it for you. These skills will also let you craft higher level weapons that swing faster, cost less stamina to swing, and pack one helluva punch. A wasteland necessity, especially when the days keep ticking by and you only have so much time until the next wave of worm ridden walkers come with housewarming gifts… like viruses. At least they brought their pets! And their aunts, and uncles, and distant cousins, and- is that their mailman? 

When you first start out you’ll face down some regular guys and girls who weren’t as lucky as you with the epidemic, pretty boiler plate zombies. While the clock keeps ticking you may start to see new types of zombies and undead fauna. Like “Fat Guy in a Hawaiian Shirt”, “Construction Worker Who’s Safety Helmet Didn’t Do Him Much Good”, and “Ohdearlordwhyisthatpoliceofficervomitingatmethatisabsolutelydisgusting”. Some zombies are faster, have the ability to jump or vomit at you, and some are just absolute tanks that soak up bullets like they’re candies. Do you like animals? Hopefully not too much because these ones want to eat you with vigor. Dogs, wolves, birds, and bears. Winnie the Pooh is long gone, say hello to his roided up cousin Wilson the Poo-lverizer. He’ll eat you up, honey or not, it won’t be a bother.

While the base gameplay is solid, the crafting and leveling is interesting and keeps my attention, the game itself is still pretty rough. Zombie AI breaking and rendering them harmless, crashes that result in an entire loss of top tier weapons and armor, slight lag that launches your car into orbit never to be seen again, and much more. The game is still in early access so bugs are expected, but this started back in 2013. I can’t say if it will ever leave early access, but they do try to fix and patch what they can. The team at “The Fun Pimps” have done massive work to 7DTD which is why I totally suggest you give it a try yourself, and make your own opinion. Much more fun with friends, and much more fun the longer you last. Now go make a base surrounded by 500 landmines and load up your nail gun, there’s Zombies to kill.