Night of the Dead

I got this game a long time ago thinking it would be short, but it rivals 7dtd and is way better in several ways. but it's infinitely harder. you have dark souls bosses, the combat is janky as hell and old, but its super fun to play with a friend! It has an actual full story unlike 7dtd, a lot of ways to farm resources, and you can even put skins ontop of your armor(it comes with 2 good free ones). i would recommend this to any 7dtd enjoyer if u dont mind somewhat bad textures and old feeling combat

TLDR This game is worth considering if it is on sale - Honestly it is quite janky but also fun to mess around with. I really like the zombie base building/defense mechanics, and its different enough from something like 7D2D that i think its worth a look - AT THE RIGHT PRICE. This would be much more appropriately priced as a $10 game to play for a weekend or two and then move on. I don't recall exactly, but I believe I got it on sale and I don't feel ripped off, but full price $30 would be pretty steep for this.
I would recommend checking out the Youtuber "Genosis" as he has a few playthroughs of this game and will give you a really good idea of what is on offer.

A surprisingly fun game. There's so many zombie survival games that many of them are forgettable. But this one turned out to have a ton of positive features that set it apart from others.
1. It has some of the most detailed and fully realized environments I've seen. In many games like this entire buildings are just giant empty shells with no doors. There's nothing inside of them. In this game it's the exact opposite. Most doorways can be opened... and behind them are hallways, rooms, and more rooms, and more rooms. Floor after floor after floor. Rooms are mainly filled with only a few lootable items, but it's the sheer volume involved that's amazing. By late game you're practically skipping 90% of what you see in a room and you get a little more picky. But you can always stop and hoover a place completely dry if you want. When I needed certain food goods I'd go to a motel and loot every single mini-fridge in every single room, on every single floor. I'd leave with whole stacks.
2. Practically everything is lootable and breakable. You can search a trash can for one type of random loot table, and then you can smash and dismantle the trash can itself for metal resources. Search a fridge, then dismantle the fridge for other resources.
3. Everything in this game serves a purpose. There's hunting and fishing in the game, but they aren't really for food or wasting time. Upgrading weapons and armor sometimes requires skins and materials from specific animals or fish. These are so valuable that I would stop my car and hunt every single pig I saw at one point. Then it was another animal for the next level of upgrades. And fishing also sometimes gives you a super rare material that's used to make one of the rarest resources in the game (cores). I loved how every mechanic in the game had a purpose.
4. The game has a diablo style random loot system for all kinds of drops: weapons, armors, gear. You get two similar items drop with radically different traits, skill bonuses, etc. Meaning you have a reason to repeatedly farm boss events just to see what kind of random roll you get next, as it's traits might work better for your playstyle.
5. The game has a very powerful and flexible upgrade system that revolves around "cores". The cores represent different elements and abilities, like cryo, pyro, purity, etc. Armor, weapons, and gear come with some of them built in already, and higher level stuff has upgrade slots to add your own.
When you get one of the core elements up to a certain level it unlocks specials abilities and traits. If you cryo cores are high enough you can become 100% immune to cold effects. Fire cores make you immune to fire effects. You will still take basic damage, but no extra elemental damage or effects. You won't be set on fire, frozen.
And combinations of different core numbers unlock totally new abilities, like a MUCH greater chance at loot drops, or the ability to leech damage as health gain. It often requires specialization in one direction to get to certain abilities, locking you out of others. But you can always switch gear/armor sets, and even take the installed cores out and move them to other gear.
And the cores are how you survive different biomes in the game. If you enter the desert biome without enough a fire core value high enough you get this incredible debuff that makes it seem like you have 2 broken legs. Heat exhaustion kicking in. When you get enough cores in fire it starts to block different percentages of that debuff. Eventually you get to 100% element blocking and the desert has no effect on you at all anymore. Same happens for the winter biome and other places.
Getting your purity cores to level 3 makes you immune to poison gas, and there are places in the game where you have to go that are filled entirely with poison gas (all the main sources of high tier metal resources are in poison gas filled mines). You can put on a gas mask to get purity 3 automatically but you take a big hit in your armor (without a good helmet on). But later on you can just have purity cores installed on your normal helmet armor and still keep all the good bonuses of higher level armor, and you're completely immune to poison gas forever.
6. The game has a series of quest chains that carry throughout the whole game. It's almost like a battlepass system built into the game. There are chains for combat, building, survival, etc. And completing one just unlocks newer ones continuing forward. The later game quests in the chains are all completely relevant, and EVERY single one gives you some kind of in-game benefits. Boosts to stats, etc. So there's a huge reason to go out and kill 25 guys with an electric weapon, then shoot so many guys with a shotgun, etc. I think I spent more time completing those quests then in any other game or MMO I've played. I am not a completionist for achievements, I could care less... but things that give me in-game stat boosts, heck yeah. I'm all over that. Half the fun was figuring out what counted for the kills. Like a specific mod on a specific weapon. Gives you a lot of reason to try out different weapons. There were a few that turned out to be really fun that I probably would have ignored unless those quest chains gave me a reason to use them.
Overall the game is well thought out and detailed, even if it looks like 20 other similar titles. Well worth playing.

I really don't know why this game isn't more popular than it is. As long as your computer is reasonably up to date, unity runs well and the graphics are great, and there is a lot of play time for your money with this game. There are a few weird interactions, like hacking rocks/boulders is a little odd at first but you get used to it. The zombie types, story, variety of interactions are really good, and I think the building is superior to a lot of other games, and there's a lot of building to do in this. I think the tower defense tag throws people off, sure if your putting spikes between you and the zombie I guess that's tower defense, but you're always building a base to defend in any game. This one does it better. It did take some getting used to, especially at first where you will probably build your base and tear it down every day, as every night is the zombie rush. You will have to get ready for the giants which is a whole different thing, and this game requires more thought and planning than any other game of this type I have played, at least if your doing it right. Electricity? You may want to study up before you volunteer. :)

TLDR: As long as you buy it for 70%+ off, it's a decent game. Definitely not worth the full price.

The basic gameplay outline has worth imo. I like building and gathering. It's just that the game feels like it's been made by a couple of guys from some back water country as their first project. Which would be fine, if it was a third the price. Horde nights and tower defense is a nice add to the otherwise basic zombie gameplay imo. I wish the base building with traps was a thing in State of Decay. And Fortnite was originally gunna be a zombie base builder, but then it turned all pvp. So all we really got is rare indies like this game.

1. It uses budget unreal asset packs, For a low budget game, expected. Ain't even hatin, cause it's the same for a bunch of other indie games I own and like.
2. It has objects that aren't scaled properly so it feel like your a toddler in some areas of the map. Some trashcans and tables just being too big.
3. Couldn't skip the tutorial, but I'm on my first play. I'll change this part if it's option even after that.
4. Animations are wonky and not fluid.
5. The dialogue has that Machine Translation thing goin on.

Pretty much the epitome of very small indie, but priced like a skilled 20 man indie team,

Night of the Dead is a survival game where daytime is prep time and nighttime is panic time.

Base building is deep, traps are addictive, and every sunset feels like a personal threat. You spend all day feeling clever, then the horde shows up and immediately audits your work. Progress is satisfying, the loop is addictive, and the chaos feels earned.

It’s stressful in the fun way.

Final verdict: If you like survival games that reward planning and punish laziness, Night of the Dead absolutely delivers.

Game was fun for sure, me and my dad played it for some time. It has glitches and some bugs but overall its a decent game. That said if you want to play on your own server... Your stuck renting one from a reliable host as the developers clearly have no experience in network coding for dedicated servers...
Tried coming back after a few years and still has the same issues with trying to host your own server and not being able to join a local hosted server... And it's your classic NAT loopback (hairpin NAT) many routers either:
* Don’t support NAT loopback
* Support it inconsistently
* Break UDP hairpinning (which this game relies on)
When NAT loopback fails, you see the server in the list but it fails to join and returns you to the main menu. The most basic fix to this is joining VIA direct connection thru console but guess what, they prevent you from accessing the console unless your in a server and at that point it is only used for admin commands on that server...
A simple console access for direct connection to servers (which every game has) would solve this issue yet they took it out for whatever reason..
Other than that the game is OK..