7 Days to Die

7 Days to Die is a zombie survival game where, every 7 days, a huge horde of zombies will descend on your location and try to eat you. You are given a week to prepare to defend yourself against this horde by crafting weapons, ammo and defences for your location. But you’ll also be needing to monitor illness, hunger and thirst the whole time too. That’s the basic jist of it, but there’s a little more to it than that.
The game has a levelling up system with so many perks to choose from and ways in which to specialise your character. It’s an almost perfect levelling system that makes sure every perk you take makes a noticeable difference in your abilities, while also reminding you that you’re often choosing one skill at the expense of another. You could, for example, be really good at fighting but not know how to cook anything and constantly be on the verge of starvation. You could be really good at harvesting raw materials but struggle to find high tier loot from containers in cities and towns. You could be really tough but really slow. You could be able to jump fifteen feet in the air but be really flimsy. It’s the ultimate challenging but fair levelling where perk selection comes with rewards and consequences.
Well, at least if you play on regular levelling. If you want to, you can set XP gain at 300% and get upwards of 2000xp for a single zombie kill, if you like playing on easy mode. I find that is too easy, but I also find the default levelling too slow, so I play on 200% XP gain, personally. Even so, there are other ways to get experience other than killing things. You can harvest materials, upgrade things you build and complete quests for local traders. Most traders are assholes. They’ll tell you to leave them the hell alone, but still give you 5000 XP and sixty bullets for killing three zombies down the road. They also help level things out a little if you haven’t specialised in many combat perks; being a reliable source of early game ammo, guns and explosives. However, they also sell stuff for crafting and skill magazines if you’ve done things the other way around.
This game is also a little like Minecraft. You can smack trees, make wooden blocks and build elaborate cube-based structures with them. Normally I find a relatively defensible structure in the wilderness – a house, mansion or junkyard – and build defences around it. You can make barbed wire, wooden spikes, dig trenches, build walls, craft shotgun turrets, machine gun turrets, spot lights and all sorts.
Ultimately the world is a sandbox, the levelling presents interesting choices and drives compromise, and the difficulty of the zombies and their attacks scales well with the player. You never feel like the zombies are unfairly tough or pathetically weak. Well, unless you exploit their pathfinding over rough terrain or find yourself having not made and reliable defences by the time the horde comes for you.
So, what are the downsides? Well… It’s early access. Forever. This game has been early access for 7-8 years and is still in alpha, a long way from beta. There’s lots of bugs. Lots of placeholder text. Weird world and terrain generation that can break the zombies entirely.
The thing that doesn’t help is sometimes the developers have odd priorities. Should they put some actual text in place of those placeholders, or make a new zombie model? That’s not to say they don’t fix bugs – they certainly do! But it does mean sometimes they would rather make zombies with jiggly boobies first.
The only other reasons not to play this are inherent to the survival/crafting genre. If you hate micromanaging arbitrary hunger and thirst bars, it’s not going to be for you. Nor will it be if the tedious task of building defences isn’t surmounted by the pay-off they provide when done.
THE GOOD
- Lots to do
- Fun with friends or alone
- Sees regular updates
- Thriving modding community
THE BAD
- 10 years in Alpha is a long time
- Major patches tend to force server wipes because they change so much stuff
7/10
DISASTER | BAD | MEDIOCRE | OKAY | |GOOD| GREAT | AMAZING | MASTERPIECE
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Is this game good? Yes. Is it worth 44 dollars? no. 1.0 release was just so they could charge more for the game. Its litterally the same exact game with the same bugs and issues before 1.0. Get it on sale or dont get it

This is a perfect example of that type of game that you play once with your friends every 6-12 months for a week or two (RELIGIOUSLY), for 10 years straight. All-nighters, showing up to work/class sleep deprived, all because it is ridiculously fun and you and all your friends do not want to stop. Freshened with new game-changing updates every now and then, you always have something to come back to.
There is an undoubted "jankiness" to the game... To me, it just adds to some of the charm. The gameplay makes you forget about the dated graphics, but The Fun Pimps have done several graphical improvements with more on the way, while the focus remains on keeping the gameplay great.
7 Days to Die is simply a very fun game and 10000% worth the purchase if you haven't tried it already.

I guess I should give a positive review since I've played almost 2200 hours... It definitely doesn't suck your life away.
I haven't found another game where the mining of all things is as satisfying, nothing scratches the itch quite the same.
I do miss the learn by doing, but I think it's more nostalgia than actually missing it.

It is a very good game. I've had it since it first came out. I played the very first Alpha version and the game has moved forward a lot. BUT. Version 1.0. The price tag is laughable. Game system and recipes? Tell me which idiot came up with the 5 raw meat to 1 grilled meat recipe? Or 1 stone = 1 sand? Why not 2 or 4 sand from one rock? Duct tape? 1 glue and 10 clothes fragment? Why 10? And why is there no recipe for springs? Why can't I lift the storage boxes? And I'm not even talking about seeds. 5 potatoes for 1 seed? WHO THE F*CK WAS THIS IDEA ? There is an awful lot of nonsense in that game (recipes, loot, levels, skill books), and an awful lot of undone things.

Nine years ago today, I purchased 7DTD and have put many hours into it, so I figure it's about time to review the game since it's about to go to 1.0.

First off, I don't like zombie movies. They bore me. The only zombie movie I've enjoyed was "Shaun of the Dead". That being said, I was skeptical about the game from the start, but it looked interesting, and I enjoyed it. In those nine years, the game has become my most played game of any. I may look away for a couple weeks if a new game catches my attention, but I always come back here. I have other games of the genre without the zombies, but this blows them away. The game is immersive to a point where you do not want to play it when someone is sleeping nearby, unless you don't mind waking them with your "startled exclamations". Seriously. I speak from experience. Now, like all games, this one has some things which will not appeal to some folks . . . it's inevitable. Fortunately, 7DTD was built with great modding capabilities, and if you don't like something, odds are a modder didn't like it either. The only thing of which I can think that I dislike, I changed with a mod.

Graphics: Excellent. I like them. The artwork pulls you in where details abound which help to create a world able to suspend disbelief. Computer is a few years old, but running 5760 x 1080 > 60 fps @ max settings.
Gameplay: Very enjoyable. Many options available to find your desired game style.
Time to Complete: Define "complete" and look at my time played.

Overall, I really like the game, including the zombies. I would recommend this game to anyone that likes the Sandbox/Survival genre, even if you don't like zombies. They work in the game, and I've come to enjoy them in their role. Thanks for your work, TFP.

Was going to play it since had nothing to play in co-op, as something to spend time in, but it turned out to be pretty great game.
At the beginning game gives you pretty bad explanation what to expect from it, and to be honest - default map feels artificial as hell, but after ~20 hours I've decided to generate huge random map and oh boy it was different experience.
Trader spawned near Huge city, and it become clear that game is way better to play and progress in the similar way as most RPG games - quest based progression.
Since each time you take a quest - game re-generates location based on Your individual skills, increasing drop rate for things you specialize in. Plus rewards for quests are pretty sweet (you can just loot any place you see, but as result you will get for example a lot of farming journals and tools, when you specifically lvl-ed up guns).
Surviving first horde night might be hard and it might give you wrong idea that you need to build killboxes and that's your only way to survive, and that's fundamentally wrong. With the correct skill sets - you will be able to just stand in the middle of the road for the whole nigh and just run-n-gun every zombie that game will throw at you, so don't repeat my mistake of building some crazy fortress with kill coridors as your base - instead it's better to enjoy pretty great building system that game has, and build something pretty - either tree house, either some underground facility or anything you can think of.
Also, one good thing which game struggles to explain in trailers and any media content - is that every house on the map, every building is tiny adventure quest, where you will move floor by floor, unlock some other routes and have pretty decent reward at the end.
Aaand full terraforming, it gives a lot of space for creativity, as last base I've built an entire maze with underground garden, library, church of the gun (lol), sauna etc.
Leveling up is also unusual and interesting - like you can level up certain skills and as result you will be better at shooting from pistols, but, you will not be able to craft better pistols - for that you need to find corresponding skill journals, which drop rate depends on your skill, and I know that when you go to journal tab, there is text literally saying that "to get more journals like this lvl up this perk" but I've figured it out only after like 10 hours in the game, and imo tutorial could be way better.
LVL cap - it's 300 levels, so if you play long enough you can literally master everything.
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As sweet as it sounds there are some minor bitter parts there:
- Traders are the only humans which you are gonna meet and they have no "logic" connected to their phrases: for example you can buy entire stock of the trader and he'll say "That's all you gonna buy? You cheap-ass m-f-er", and it breaks atmosphere a bit, minor issue but unpleasant one
- Another problem is that building system is really flexible, but some times you will need to spend ~10 minutes searching right block shape, and god forbid if you placed wrong one using some advanced material - there is no quick way to remove them
- Late game tools (chainsaw etc) are just worse than manual ones from the previous tier - steel pick can break stone block in one hit and doesn't require any gas to run, so there is no benefit in getting your tools to max level,
- Electricity sucks, it chews up your FPS regardless of hardware which you have, and besides you can only connect anything to one "inbound" cable - so if you wanna make door that will be opened by camera from the outside and using switch on the inside f-u, there is simply no way of doing that
- Glass don't pass light, so, greenhouse - nope, only if you make roof out of iron fence (for some reason it passes light)
- Game stage and loot stage mechanics, they are cool and interesting but having simple line saying "loot that you find improves with your level and location difficulty" would help me so much, since it was a huge surprise for me that at lvl 100 starting town had really decent loot, and I can chill there for some time instead of going last biom raids all the time.