Rating of
1.5/5
If the Zombies Don’t Kill You, the Boredom Will
Nelson Schneider - wrote on 01/16/25
“7 Days to Die” (“7D”) is the first (and, thankfully, only) game by Texas-based Indie developer, the ironically-named The Fun Pimps. The Pimps, themselves, love to talk about how they are all “experienced videogame developers” with 14 years of work in their collective portfolios… but that’s just the tag line they’ve started using after finally bringing “7D” out of Early Access open beta testing after 12 years in the works. So the truth of the matter is that a bunch of untested neophyte Texans got together and decided they wanted to make the Zombie Survival game of their dreams… is it any wonder it turned out to be a nightmare?
To be fair, this is NOT the type of game I would ever choose to play on my own, or even encourage as a coop title for the MJ Crew. Indeed, I was quite vociferous in my disapproval and tried every possible tactic to prevent Chris from forcing us to play this steaming pile of toilet pudding with him, but, alas, The Fun Pimps went and released the official 1.0 version of the game, ending Early Access and the incredibly-low Early Access pricing. Unfortunately for everyone involved, the official 1.0 release did NOT, in fact, end Early Access, but was merely a paper launch, as The Fun Pimps are continually monkeying around with the game’s inner workings at basic levels, and managed to push out updates bringing to game to version 1.2 by the time we finally had another game that was enticing enough to get Chris to release his death grip on our cooperative game nights. I certainly hope he enjoyed his little power trip, because he burned his one hallpass for shitty Zombie games, and I won’t be partaking in any more.
Presentation
“7D” is built in Unity, the preferred crappy engine for crappy, inexperienced developers, like The Fun Pimps. Fortunately for The Pimps, Unity hadn’t set itself on fire yet when they started work on “7D” in 2013 (the same year “Warframe” came out, which is an ongoing live service, still getting new content, and is soooo much more fun), so perhaps the Unity License changes (that have since been reverted) encouraged them to finish up and get out of Early Access. Regardless, “7D” still feels like an Early Access game, with generic environments, generic animations, nonsensical visual mistakes (why is it when I drink coffee, it shows me guzzling clear liquid out of the same mason jar used for all drinks?), and a whole lot of bugs.
To be fair, though, the basic premise of the game’s design mentality is for the world to be the same kind of fully-destructible, fully-craftable sandbox first pioneered by “Minecraft,” only more realistic-looking than “Minecraft’s” world of cubes and N64-era blocky characters. To that extent, “7D” succeeds, and does so admirably. The game world doesn’t look like it’s made of voxels at all, but rather looks like a boring, generic 3D game from the PS3/Xbox 360 era, where everything is drab and dirty. The game’s ambitious day/night cycle (which isn’t really that ambitious, since “Dragon Quest 4” did it on the original NES) is kind of a flop as well, as it never really gets “dark” at night, making it rather pointless to invest in night-vision goggles, flashlights, or torches, since it never really gets darker than twilight.
Audio-wise, “7D” is a complete mess. The soundtrack is appropriately bizarre for a post-apocalyptic Zombie game, but musical tracks and audio stingers will play randomly and arbitrarily with no rhyme or reason. One would think maybe a subdued background music would play for each of the game world’s different biomes, then switch to something more ominous when exploring a zombie-infested ruin… but no, just random dramatic outbursts for no reason. Non-musical audio is just as borked, as the game features incredibly horrible directional audio. When zombies become aware of the player, they’ll let out a hiss that would be a helpful indicator of the direction the danger is coming from, but on my stereo system with faux surround sound (which normally does great with directional audio), zombie hisses just seemed to come from everywhere, like the zombie was inside my head, greatly reducing any feeling of usefulness and realism from the game’s sound effects.
Technically, “7D” has a LOT going on under the hood, and what with running on Unity, I’m surprised it isn’t actually buggier than it is. Still we had numerous disconnection errors, and Chris (as host) experienced an unbelievable amount of crashes. Fortunately, the game does autosave compulsively, so these issues rarely resulted in the loss of significant “progress” (progress in a game with no point goes in quotes), but they were still incredibly annoying, especially when it took Chris’ computer (which is showing its age but isn’t terrible, especially when compared to the specs of the average 2013 computer) 10 minutes or more to LOAD THE DAMNED GAME WORLD!
Story
The one talisman I was able to use to keep this game off the MJ Crew’s coop list for as long as I did was “it doesn’t have a campaign.” We were all in agreement that we should only play games that have a beginning and an end. Unfortunately, Chris’ weird obsession with Zombie Schlock caused him to disregard this rule as soon as the game came out of Early Access. The Fun Pimps allege that having a campaign/story mode is on their road map for future updates, but they’ve been saying that for a decade, and no campaign has appeared.
Players are dropped into a randomly generated world (or log into one of The Fun Pimps’ always-on hosted servers) with nothing but a note saying something like “Welcome to Navezgane, try not to die.” Players are mostly at the mercy of their random spawn point, which will generally be in the “easy” Cedar Forest biome, near a few points of interest. Outside of a handful of tutorials explaining how to build starter gear, the only real piece of “narrative” in the game is an exhortation for the player to find the nearest merchant, who is marked by a waypoint.
Upon finding a merchant, the player will start on an ‘epic’ quest line to do fetch quests for the merchant, clear points of interest of zombies for the merchant, or clear points of interest of zombies AND fetch an item for the merchant. After doing enough menial tasks for the merchant, the player can unlock another tier of quests, which feature all of the same stuff as the previous tier, plus the option to restore electrical power to a point of interest at night. Continuing to suck up to the first merchant will cause him to direct the player to the second merchant in the next biome: The Charred Forest. Then the player can find her (ogling her great tits is optional, but it was one of the only things I enjoyed in the game) and repeat the process, until she tells you to find the third merchant, and so on and so forth, until all five merchants have been met.
And that’s it. Fetch questing at its most boring, banal and repetitive. What’s even better is that merchants will send the player to points of interest the player(s) have already cleared out… which magically revert to their default state of un-looted by the magic of the quest.
There is no backstory given for the post-apocalyptic state of the world. A few tidbits of lore can be inferred by the environment, but all-in-all, “7D” has a worse non-story than all of From Software’s recent turds smeared together into one large skidmark. And the worst thing about my personal experience is that Chris had us farting around in his world for over 70 hours doing the same stuff over and over.
Gameplay
The game’s primary gimmick is right there in the title: Every 7 in-game days (which take varying amounts of time depending on what the world host sets up for cycle length), there will be a Blood Moon horde night, in which a near-infinite quantity of zombies will magically appear near the player(s) and rush toward them. The objective of the player(s), therefore, is to build some sort of fortification that will help ward off the Horde until the Blood Moon sets and the sun rises once again.
Starting players, however, have to slog through a whole bunch of bog-standard, non-fun Survival-Crafting nonsense to even get to the primary gameplay of Horde Defense. Players start with nothing and no skills. Crafting basic “primitive” equipment to start, players must then gather enough materials to attempt to build a base – or, more likely, reinforce an existing point of interest after clearing it of its initial population of zombies. Of course, even if the players have gathered the materials, crafting anything of value is still a far-off dream, as the characters themselves don’t know how to do much of anything. The solution to this ignorance is two-fold: Experience and Magazines.
Allegedly, in most of the Alpha builds of “7D,” player characters gained skill levels by doing things associated with that skill, similar to how older titles in ‘The Elder Scrolls’ series worked. However, for the final (lol) release build, The Fun Pimps decided that character skill development should be entirely dependent upon finding and reading informational magazines. While it is true that reading is a great way to learn new things quickly, in “7D,” the ‘quickly’ part is completely missed, as it takes DOZENS or HUNDREDS of magazines to rank-up necessary skills to actually-useful levels. Of course, while the player(s) is out raiding mailboxes and bookshelves in a desperate bid to learn something useful, they are NOT harvesting other resources or crafting the sadly-essential food and drink items necessary to simply exist.
I’ve never really been into the Survival-Crafting game fad that swept PC gaming a decade ago, as I really don’t care for “realism” or having to screw around with covering basic needs in a Fantasy or Sci-Fi setting. The only Survival-Crafting game I’ve really spent any time with before “7D” was “No Man’s Sky” (also a Chris-game), which I really enjoyed… due to the ability to turn-off most of the Survival-Crafting BS. Unfortunately, unlike “No Man’s Sky,” which allows each player in a group to use whatever level of “realism” they want, “7D’s” levels of BS are entirely up to the host. And while Chris could have turned off the need for food and drink (or at least turned it down), he left it at the default, so our characters were constantly gasping and groaning from hunger and thirst.
Outside of the poorly-designed and tediously-slow-progressing crafting and skill systems, and the titular horde nights, the only other thing to do from a gameplay perspective in “7D” is explore the environment. Exploration typically involves finding a point of interest – which will display its name prominently in the HUD, along with its difficulty level in Skull Emojis – then slowly working through it, killing zombies (typically with melee weapons, since it takes dozens of hours to unlock decent guns), breaking down walls, and harvesting anything that might be of value until the player’s character’s inventory is completely full, the character is encumbered, and must waddle back to base to unload the loot.
Playing in a team is simultaneously a much easier experience and a much more annoying one. While it’s great to be able to divide up the boring and mundane tasks and assign them to people who get off on that sort of thing (Nick was really into digging holes and mining for some reason), it makes inventory management more of a chore, since players actually have to swap skill magazines to focus on one or two areas of expertise instead of just reading everything as they come across it. It would have been REALLY nice if reading a skill magazine as part of a group would share that skill XP with the whole group, but the furthest The Fun Pimps were willing to take the sharing concept was shared XP for killing zombies.
As for my area of expertise, I chose Merchant and Base Architect. I was good at them and they were at least ‘tolerable’ for 70 hours. I was pleased to contribute to the group with vast riches (in the form of casino tokens) and rare acquisitions from the game’s various traders. Likewise, my base design was excellent. Unfortunately, even the things I could have enjoyed about the “7D” experience were hampered by horrendous design. Our base constantly had zombies spawning INSIDE the perimeter for no reason. Likewise, the zombies (prior to the update The Fun Pimps rolled out before our last two sessions) were all super-geniuses who avoid all of our elaborate traps better than Spider-Man, zeroing-in with singular focus on any insignificant design oversight or weak point and hitting it until it broke.
Overall
“7 Days to Die” is not the type of game I would ever choose to play, either by myself or with the rest of the MJ Crew. Unfortunately, it IS exactly the type of brain-dead, poorly-designed, technically broken mess Chris will obsess over, as long as it has zombies in it. I was ready to stop playing and move onto something else after the first 7 in-game days, but was forced to tough it out until day 28. While the gameplay experience does admittedly improve with time invested, it never actually becomes “fun” or “good.” Rather, it becomes the slowest-paced Tower Defense game out there, where you have to wait for many hours and slog through much boredom and mindless repetition before getting another crack at seeing how a base will perform vs. the Horde. And that seems to be a real trend among Tower Defense games that try to do something different: They’ll have some really neat, novel approach (in the case of this game, the “Minecraft”-style world), then ruin it with poor balancing, poor pacing, and not a few technical issues. The MJ Crew only paid about $7 for our copies of the game… and I still think we got ripped-off.
Presentation: 2.5/5
Story: 0.5/5
Gameplay: 2/5
Overall (not an average): 1.5/5
