Night of the Dead

Sum-Up
In-depth analysis further down.
If you’re looking for some screenshots click here to view all the ones I took for this game.
🟩 Pros
🟥 Cons
• Excellent base building system, with great quality-of-life functions such as automation, labels, snap / free placement swap, auto-sort, auto-material-pick, and more.
• Tremendously vast world, with a high amount of quest- or task-related POIs to explore, loot and clear out of zombies. These locations often have unique, useful rewards in them.
• High number of unique items to drop from both bosses and rare enemies, which can be further customized, upgraded and re-rolled to fit your playstyle.
• Solid gameplay variety: other than combat, activities like farming, fishing, quests, hunting, foraging, mining, trading, base-building and exploring are available, and useful.
• Good variety of elite and special enemies, all with unique attack patterns and abilities to keep combat from becoming too repetitive.
• Companions are boring and useless. Not only are they a detriment in combat, but also have no personality, often get stuck, and half their AI commands are a bugged mess.
• The main story is boring and clichèd, with an ending that doesn’t make a lot of sense, and other debatable non sequiturs in the narrative or characters.
• No incentive to explore any location that isn’t marked by some quest or task; you’ll never find anything good in them.
• On higher difficulties, most bosses are unfeasible to defeat with melee builds; this means you either go for a ranged one for mid-late game, or get obliterated.
• The tutorials are insufficient and half-assed: many fundamental game mechanics will never be explained properly or at all, and aren’t intuitive either. Google is your friend.
🟨 Bugs & Issues
🔧 Specs
• Several issues with objective completion tracking, mostly in secondary quests.
• In rare cases, the main quest can break if a boss is killed in specific ways. Reload a save to fix.
• Vehicle collision models, physics are inaccurate and buggy, making driving a painful experience.
• A few specific areas cause massive performance issues regardless of settings / specs.
• Melee weapon hitbox / hitreg are inaccurate, clunky and inconsistent.
• i9 13980HX
• 64GB RAM DDR5
• RTX 4090
• NvME SSD
• 3840x2160
Content & Replay Value:
It took me and a friend 82 hours to finish Night of the Dead (NOTD) on Hard difficulty; we took extra time to explore, build an advanced base, acquire the best gear and complete side quests. The content is linear; I don’t see a reason to replay.
Is it worth buying?
Yes, especially for co-op. The price of 29€ is excellent for this amount, and overall good quality of content. For open-world survival fans, I can recommend getting it for full price.
Verdict: Good
Rating Chart Here
A well-made and varied open-world zombie survival that, however, could've done better in many departments. Still, it's an overall fun experience, especially in co-op.
In-Depth
Writing & Worldbuilding
Scorched and destroyed, the world does feel like a post-apocalypse setting: most buildings are dilapidated, horrifying abominations roam the streets, nature and animals reclaimed the dominion of men. The general low quality of visuals, especially textures, and the immersion-breaking fact 90% of buildings are just props that can’t be entered, detracts from the realistic feeling. However, exploring the world is interesting and there’s a good number of locations, cities and biomes with their own visual identity, all made reasonably well.
The story is a clichèd, disjointed mess for the most part. While your objective of finding a cure is clear, the way you interact with characters most good and evil doesn’t make a lot of sense. There are no choices, and little explanation of the motives of each of them. Moreover, you’ll never know how each of them ended up, and after their related questlines, it will be as if they stop existing entirely. The decent amount of diaries and notes is adequately-written, but hardly meaningful to expand upon the lore.
Exploration & Secrets
You’ll explore initially on foot, then with a series of progressively-better, upgradeable vehicles like motorbikes and trucks. Surprisingly enough, you’ll even be able to build on some of them, effectively making them mobile bases of sorts, which is extremely useful given how much land you’ll have to traverse. Building your own paths, like bridges, will be fundamental to get anywhere in a reasonable time. Aside from the locations marked by quests, there will be traders to find, but nothing else much interesting. There are no secrets off the beaten path, nothing you can’t find that isn’t marked automatically at some point. Custom waypoints and markers in the shape of flags are very useful to keep track of what’s what, since the map won’t automatically mark traders or resource rich spots - you have to do that yourself, and with how big the world is, you’ll need to.
Combat System & Bosses
For most part of the early to mid game, ammunition will be scarce and you’ll be too broke to buy them in bulk from traders; that means good old melee will be your bread and butter, and not a bad solution at dealing with zombies. An assortment of weapons ranging from swords to spears to hammers is available in color-coded rarity tiers, giving them passive bonuses and traits - you can also mod them freely with powerful attachments. The melee combat is clunky and inconsistent, and seems taken out of an early alpha rather than a finished product. Many times you’ll be hit by obscene hitboxes, or bamboozled by super-jank animations. However, the damage system on zombies is dynamic and pleasant enough, allowing you to mutilate them to diminish their threat.
Ranged weapons work well enough, and are an all-around superior alternative that, however, costs ammo, which is hard to come by in sufficient amounts. Until late-game, there are very few firearms actually worth using, compared to the melee weapons which only cost durability. Regardless, you’ll need bullets to face bosses, because going melee against their teleporting, animation-skipping, hitreg-bending melee attacks is a sure way to end up dead. Speaking of bosses, they have evolving phases as their health decreases, and have a chance to drop unique items you can’t obtain in other ways - grinding them numerous times using Access Cards, obtained by looting or side quests, is the only way to get gear strong enough to face the late-game threats.
Base Building & Crafting
Your base can be built anywhere in the world without limits. A vast array of walls, facilities, defenses and utility buildings is available and progressively unlocked as you defeat bosses and complete research projects, using the Research papers dropped by enemies, sort-of like XP, but for passives and abilities that allow you to craft new, or better stuff. The quality of life is great, and even if the inventory controls take a while to get used to, after a bit your base will be a comfortable safe haven in the apocalypse. But this can end every night, when enormous hordes of zombies attack it, so preparing your defenses strategically, in a tower-defense style almost, will be paramount for your survival. You’ll have to make sure to not run out of power, maintain the defenses taking damage, and reload any ranged turrets with ammunition regularly - all while zombies pound at your door.

Ok.. only 5 hrs in but I am a survival game enthusiast and have played them all.
If you like 7 Days to Die, you will love this game 100%. Instead of a horde every 7 days its every night.
There is a sh** ton of crafting recipes from building, crafting benches, weapons, tools, decoraions, ext..
THE ONLY THING is that I heard the devs are done updating this game which is heartbreaking and really made me not want to even buy the game. DEVS PLEASE ALLOW MODDING! This is will save this game!
*UPDATE @ 80+hours*
EVERYONE GO TO THEIR WEBSITE AND EMAIL THEM A SUGGESTION TO ALLOW MODDING!!!!! MAKE THIS GAME GREATER!!!!

I've just finished the main story with 169 hours of gameplay, and I must say, this game is incredible. Although it feels a bit unusual at the beginning, this actually works in its favor, as the game introduces unique mechanics that differ from traditional survival games. These mechanics might not be immediately clear, but they add a refreshing twist to the genre.

The daily horde attacks, while intimidating at first, quickly become a highlight of the game. The trap mechanics make each night an exhilarating experience. The map is vast, offering plenty of loot, numerous mobs, world bosses, main story bosses, a variety of weapons, and fantastic upgrade mechanics.

I highly recommend this game. It's super fun and definitely worth your time.

the jank here is absolutely amazing, rivaling both 7 Days to Die and SCUM in its awkward combat, poor localization, glitchy physics, technical bugs (make sure to try true fullscreen if, like me, you got inexplicably locked into a resolution literally half of your monitor's), and confused voice actors trying their absolute best to deliver lines that make Bethesda npc barks seem well conceived - with even less voice direction than Bethesda deigns to give.

but like 7 Days and SCUM this game has a lot of charm and depth in its funkiness, even if i'm not totally sure yet it'll have the staying power of those games. mod support would help but i'm not sure how feasible that is in Unreal. it's fun though and certainly worth a few dozen hours rambling around, beating zombies into literal pulp and making Saw-meets-Rube-Goldberg death traps.

(All my hours are solo gameplay)
The game is not abandonware, it’s finished, people seem to be having a tough time grasping this concept.
This game can absolutely be child’s play if you play it on easier settings, but trust me when I say this, playing it on the hardest difficulty settings is far more fun and rewarding (but not you iron man).
Without a doubt, this game is a grind-fest. You will be grinding for resources for an ungodly amount of time. You will have a tough time grasping the concept behind building your base. You will save scum to recover 1-2hrs back because you spent to much time Lolly gagging rather than resource farming for your base build and finally, you will restart multiple runs until you hit your flow state.
It is a punishing game, not in terms of technical ability, but in terms of your time management capabilities.
Edit (20250426):
I feel I should add a bit more to this, as there are certainly issues that need to be discussed.
One of the most glaring issues, in my eyes, is the games polish. There is a plethora of bugs & glitches you will run into, however, none of them negatively impacted in a way that impeded progress or discouraged me from playing.
Next up would be the story, certainly not one of the most compelling narratives I have seen, but I feel that having it is certainly better than not having it at all. Without it, I feel that there would be no sense of progress, which I find is absolutely essential in survival games.
One other issue would be the animations. Once again, certainly not the best, but also, not the worst. My problem with them, is that some of the animations are misleading and attacks will occur earlier/later than (I believe) is intended, making dodging attacks difficult.
AI pathing for the hordes can also be a bit finicky, but once you spend enough time experimenting with base builds, you’ll quickly discover what works and what doesn’t. Tip: Height is your friend just make sure you have proper supports.
There are more issues that can be mentioned, however, I’d like to bring up my main point:
Why am I only mentioning these issue now?
Honestly, it’s because I can overlook the flaws and focus on what the devs did right:
Game Mechanics
Survival, Exploration, Action, RPG, Crafting, Base-building/Tower-defense
In my opinion, only one other game has done this formula correctly (7DtD) and even then, I prefer NotD’s approach.
Truly, this game will surprise you.
It takes effort to get there, but once you do, there is nothing more satisfying than eviscerating countless zeds at night with your traps.
Or the feeling when you complete a insane melee build that tears up zeds like nothing.
There’s also nothing more humbling than when you “unlock” a new area, and then get slapped around by stronger zeds, but as a result, loot better gear.
Which brings me back full circle to the games difficulty, turn that **** all the way up, if you don’t make this game difficult on yourself, you are not going to enjoy the moments that you should once you get good enough.

I really love the game, I can recommend it easily but I've noticed there hasn't been any updates from the devs in a while.
Jackto, if you guys stop work on it, will you please add modding support of some kind first? I'm sure people could add some cool stuff to help keep it fun for a long time.

fun game, wish they were still working on it and fixing/adding stuff, but fun for what it is