Night of the Dead

I've waited a long time to review this game but after 5,700 hours I am ready.
UPDATED: I am doing an update to this review at 6,240 hours.
This game turned out to become my favorite game for the past two years. It's so fun to play and so challenging. I initially bought it because it said early access and "get involved with this game as it develops". I've never done that before so it sounded awesome. It's been an awesome 2+ years play-testing this game. Jackto has been an awesome developer to work with!
In this game you can loot cars, houses, office buildings and chop down trees, crush boulders and haul all these materials back to a camp where you can build a base. Each night (you can change it in the settings) you are attacked by a wave of zombies that you CAN NOT hide from! They always know where you are and they will never go away! You're in luck though because you can build a lot of different traps to help kill the zombies.
The zombies. Well, these aren't some Walking Dead zombies that's for sure. Think more like Resident Evil. Some kind of dark, twisted creations crawling out of the underground lab. The zombies in this game are amazing. They are Jackto's pride and joy. These zombies will terrify you. Not at first, the early world zombies are harmless, but the deeper you dive into this world the scarier (and harder) it gets.
There is a large open world to explore. You can build anything, anywhere but the buildings that come with the map are indestructible. A lot of people use this to their advantage. There are vehicles in the game now that you can use to get around the large map faster. You can build stuff on one of the vehicles and I can't tell you how fun it is to build a ton of storage containers on one and take it out for a day long scavenge. I use the vehicle like a pack mule.
The game has a lot of customization settings now. You can change your difficulty mid-game so if you think it's too hard or too easy you can go alter the settings in the existing game without having to start a new game. Super convenient. Some of us like to disable the nightly wave and take our time to build then re-enable the wave when we're ready. There's so many ways you can play it and there is also a sandbox mode now too. You can build a base for free and throw zombies at it whenever you want using the sandbox to test it out.
Anyways I highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys tower defense games with a zombie element. Who enjoys open world games where you can build anywhere and who enjoys games that present with a real challenge. This game will keep throwing surprises at you as you play. It's very entertaining. :D
Jackto does read all our posts in the Steam forum so if you had a message to communicate with the developer you can post there. I can confirm for you that they do read there even if they don't always respond. If you experience a bug you can report it there and expect it to get fixed, although not very fast. Think zombie speed, and no, not World War Z zombie speed :p
This game is being created by 2 main developers using the Unreal 4 engine, 1 programmer (Jeonghyun Ha) and 1 artist (Lee Min-gyu). Crowd funding only made $2790 USD to begin working on the game. Jackto Studios is an indie game development team started in 2018 with two colleagues working on the same team at a game company.
"We were working at a game company and making games, but we were just office workers rather than creators making games. That's why we created this team and started this project to develop the games we want to play and create."
Jackto still has a couple major developments planned before they call the game finished so we are still in development stage at the present time. The optimization work is coming along well but the game might still be eating resources. Make sure you have enough RAM. Be prepared to tolerate the occasional BUG before it gets fixed (zombie speed).
There are currently no NPC's in the game to interact with. It's just you and the zombies. There's no living soul in sight. If you want a team, play multiplayer. This game is actually super fun multiplayer.
The game still does not support controllers and I haven't seen any indication that it will ever be implemented. I play the lottery sometimes. If I ever win I'll pay to hire someone to just work for Jackto long enough to add controller support to this game for you guys and that's all. XD
If you want to see some of the gameplay and screenshots or read about how to play the game, check out my guide where I cover a lot of gameplay basics. Come on, let me help you!
I've also created a Steam group for people who are looking for players to game with.
I enabled the comments so if you have any questions for someone who's played this game almost since the beginning, ask away. I'm very active on Steam right now and should be able to respond to you within a day.

A little bit of Scum. A dash of Orcs Must Die. A healthy serving of Project Zomboid. And a whole lot of fun.
Not a perfect game by any means. Still bugs and the occasional crash to iron out, but the combination of survival, exploration, crafting, base building, trap building, a touch of RPG and a friggin Zombie wave (horde) every bloody night makes this game one of my favourites ever! There is a neat story element to it and the tutorial/quest list is really extensive. It might be a few years old but the devs are still working on it to improve the experience and gameplay (which is a huge plus these days!)
Definitely worth a look.

This game has a very Project Zomboid feeling character creation, but once you drop in you see that it's very much based on 7 Days to Die. The most major difference is that 7 Days is based on building with a blocks system, and this game is not at all. There's plenty of building, it's just different. While 7 Days does have traps, this game has TRAPS. There is a zombie horde every night instead of every week, and the traps you get access to very early on like the pendulum trap will still be helpful into the end game. It's like zombie tower defense. It's pretty fun at first but I admit, it does get a little old having to run back to base every single night just to deal with it.
I will also say, this game is janky. It's early access so that's just going to happen, but on several occasions I ran into floating fire.. as in, a wooden part of a base caught fire, it was either put out or burned down, but the fire just floated there and burned me ever after. There were also many, many times where I would strike a tree or rock while trying to gather resources, and it would just disappear without giving me any. (I learned later, from a friend, that I could shoot the disappeared tree or rock with a pistol to make it appear again, and it works.. go figure.) This was the most common problem I ran into.
All that being said? It's actually good. It needs fixes, it needs more points of interest. It needs more items. It needs a much, much better endgame. (It's not so fun looting a building when you already have massive stacks of everything that drops, and the equipment cabinets aren't special because you already have lightsabers..) The biggest grind is stuff like copper, oddly enough, and LEAVES. Finding a tier 6 weapon means basically nothing once you've already got it, but spending real time chopping hundreds of bushes, trees and rocks is an unavoidable reality. The farming system is also rough.. even when you get tier 3 farm plots, don't expect to really be able to make many beneficial things with it that you couldn't more easily buy or find elsewhere. Meat alone can get you through this game, and painkillers are cheap. Oh I could go on and on..
For what I payed though, and the near 60 hours I got out of it, and the potential to come back later after a year or two of updates and try it on hard mode or something? Yeah. I'd say it's a good game.

as i enter again on my 400th hr in the game. im so happy that the devs continue to improve and add more content to the game. Bug fixes and optimization. At my 1st steam account i played the game on its very early stages, where i gained around 400+ hrs base building and testing out stuff. Bad optimizations and bugs. But now as years go by for the game, it has significantly improved a lot. compared to a lot of Zombie Surival games i played. That eagerness to build stuff, bigger and bigger bases as you defend from the hoard gives me the break in my daily life. I rarely have a relaxing experience when i play survival games, but not this game. It give you a certain accomplishment that your build held up on the rushing hoard. This is one of factor why i love this game. A good community that helps new players, a dev the listen and appreciate there player base. A constant improvement and update to the game. Its really one of the best game on my list.

Wow, I really wasn't planning on spending seven and a half hours playing this game tonight but it dragged me in. During my playtime I had zero crashes and didn't witness any bugs. The graphics are great and the game play is fun. The tutorial could be a bit better for someone that hasn't played the genre before but I would imagine most people that pick up the game know what to expect.
I started my base building at my spawn location right away, I soon realized there were plenty of better spots but oh well it is my first go at it. My biggest problem (and this isn't the games problem) is that I setup my traps in such a manner that I did just about as much damage to me as the zombies, so I had to stay in certain spots and while the traps reloaded it would give the mobs a chance to gang up on me. It is great imagining how I want to set my traps up the next go around. I just didn't design the flow control like I should.
I may be wrong as I haven't done any research yet on the game, but from my time playing it is more about letting traps do the majority of the work and you finishing off the few that get through. The trick of course is to manage to reset the traps as they occasionally will need to manually be reset using one of the many resources in the game.
As far as the enemies in the game. It's not just Zombies that will wreck your day, wolves, alligators and bears and all put a violent end to your journey if you are not careful. But each of these critters amount many others are kill able, skin able and tasty.
All in all my first session with this game is great. I haven't had this much fun with a base building Zombie game since many years ago when 7 Days to Die first came out. So far this came is much stabler than 7D2D and very enjoyable. I can see myself keep coming back to it even before it leaves early access which often isn't something I regularly do with EA titles, because I like to wait for the full release but seeing how the game is as stable as it is and already has achievements it already seem so far, release ready in my book.

First of all, I am not a professional zombie survival player however I was enjoying this game so far. It has a great start
and you are not getting lost in this game. The walkie talkie, thank god, brings a life into this game. The movement of the
player is well made and for me it feels very smooth to play, love it.
+ 31 Gb install. Not much. It is ok.
+ The Menu is well made. Simple and good looking.
+ The game runs very stable. It is very smooth. However, it depends on the system. Got a 4070 ti and it runs like butter.
+ DLSS and DX 12 support + Lumen! Lumen is one of the most important things these days to get the perfect area lighting effects! I love it since "No one survived".
+ You have a lot of options to adjust the game behaviour (you can edit these when a savegame exists and before loading the game).
+ You can create your own character. It is very detailed.
+ It is very scary. Jumpscares ahead. A lot of zombies can suddenly appear over the corner.
+ A lot of freedom to build.
+ Items have different rarity and are modifiable.
+ You can upgrade your buildings and structures.
+ Waves!
+ Funny traps
+ Big Map
+ Story
+ Wolves, birds, deers and rabbits to hunt. Walkie talkie buddies explain that these animals can mutate!^^
+ Good voices coming with the walkie talkie.
+ Tutorial is well done.
+ Lots of Quests.
+ Third Person / First Person view, in my eyes one of the most important things in survival games to have both options. Well made!
+ No game crashes so far!
+ You can level up you character and adjust the stats.
+ Newbie friendly.
+ Zombies stop chasing you when you run far enough. And it is not far. Thanks for this. Very important. Not like "No one survived".
+ It is not that frustrating. Thanks developers!
+ Updates for the game still exist!
- Zombies are not very responsive. They only react if you looted something and not during looting.
- Zombies are not very noisy. It is hard to detect them.
- You cannot change/adjust your body.
- No modding
- Graphics look a bit outdated. However, I saw the upcoming changes and I would love to see the upcoming graphics changes.
- A lot of clothes have been removed but will see the upcoming updates this quarter.
- You have long tracks to get to something.
- Trees and Stones do not appear over time again. You have to explicitly activate this in the game options but it increases the difficulty? Something i do not understand.
This is what I have to tell you guys about the game now. Developers you did a great job on this however you have to improve the zombies
because this is one of the things I struggle to stay at the game as it is. They have to be more aggressive and more responsive. You have
to show us hell on earth! Screaming zombie hordes at far distance running towards you can be so exciting. The distance for the sound should
also be like they were coming closer and closer. Also when you adjust the game in the way that zombies would walk instead of run.
This game has a lot of potential and I hope it will be more exciting in the future. But please don't take to long because the attention span of people
won't hold on that long to reach a big player base.

One of my favorite games ever. I'm a solo player...
Cannot wait for the missions to be finished!
Notes to devs-
-It's not clear if I can still leave the island or not. e.g. I've finished the main quest line and am not sure if that's it and now im just fighting waves...until more content is added. How do I unlock the harder custom difficulties, after googling it appeared there used to be journals so I spent time in game trying to determine if those still exist.
-It's unclear that I need to progress to areas to unlock new building capabilities. I had many quest items that needed a wrench and spent hours trying to figure out why I couldn't make the bench to make one. ( apparently I had to go to the pool area to unlock the workbench for that )
-Please change all "build" to "possession" or create an "exists". I frequently would do many things ahead of them appearing in the journal. It may be worth showing all quests but greying those out that have dependencies so I can see what I should or should not do in advance.
^^^-->>> put a huge disclaimer that the game is best enjoyed if you follow quests
-I can craft turbocharger, etc but don't know what its for so im questioning if I missed visiting a certain area to unlock additional cars
-Do mines regenerate? I'm out of magnesium and gold and it's a lengthy process to find gear to upgrade to then recycle into these materials or find the money to buy them.
-- I don't know how to activate sandbox if that is still a thing or what commands exists, can you index them and add a help command for console line
-Pls make glass breakable, just do a sloppy replacement of the texture with a new glass break object on hit detect :D
-I have the mutant substance but am not sure what its for
-I have the microchips but am not sure what they are for
-The last two books you would get are swapped in the journal, you get a at b and b at a