With the 7 Days to Die 1.0 experimental version having been available for several weeks, I wanted to share my thoughts on the state of the game and how it compares to previous versions, as well as my expectations of a 1.0 release. This will be purely an opinion piece from the perspective of me, Alk.
There are millions of early-access games out there today. Back in 2013, when this game first went into public early access, it wasn’t nearly as common. I think this worked wonders for the game, and it might not have taken off like it did if it were to be released today in early access. However, the only opinions I can form are of the last few versions. My first real experience with this game was in 2023, right before the alpha 21 update. I had loaded it up a couple times before that, but never really sunk my teeth into it. So I don’t have much of an opinion about anything before then. I will be comparing this game to other early access games, other games of a similar genre, and my expectations of what this game could and should be. I have a lot of conflicting opinions about this game. I’ll split my review into 3 parts: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.
The Good
At first glance, 7 Days to Die is some sort of survival-crafting open-world RPG. There are many games that fit this description. I think 7D2D does neatly fit into that category, but it stands out with the quality of its base gameplay loop. I am currently running a pistol-centric build (I’ll get to the “builds” later). No matter what I’m doing, it’s always fun to just blast some zombies. There’s nothing fancy about it, and there doesn’t need to be. In my opinion, that’s the most important thing to get right in a video game. The little things that make up the core gameplay loop. The guns are fun to fire. The movement is satisfying. The sound design is great. Watching a zombie’s head explode is extremely satisfying. Double-tapping a zombie who is about to get up only to fall back down is great. Cutting through a hoard with automatic fire or a few penetrating shots is delightful. Ultimately, in the moment-to-moment gameplay, it doesn’t matter what gear I have, what XP or loot I’m getting, what my base looks like, or anything else. As long as that core gameplay loop is satisfying, any game has the potential to be a masterpiece. Even if most of the rest of the game was bad, it would still be worth it for many people just because of the quality of that core gameplay loop.
There’s nothing fancy about blowing a zombie’s head off, and there doesn’t need to be.
Another example of this idea in effect would be Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. That game is devoid of “meta” gameplay mechanics like levels, base building, damage numbers, upgrades, inventory, etc., but it absolutely perfected the core gameplay loop. You walk around, gun down zombies, maybe pick up some ammo or different weapons, and work together as a team, and that’s all you need. Left 4 Dead 2 is one of the best first-person shooters ever made, in my opinion. 7 Days to Die isn’t nearly as good in comparison, but it has the same spirit of extremely satisfying, simple gameplay. It also has a lot of other mechanics that I’ll talk about, but none of them carry the game like the core gameplay loop.
However, “core gameplay loop” can be a little ambiguous if you never engage in combat. And that’s a valid playstyle if you’re playing with a group. My friend, who teamed up with me in my latest playthrough, doesn’t go on missions or explore. He’s a homebody who exclusively specializes in crafting and salvaging and spends most of his time building and improving the base and keeping us stocked up on everything. I just give him all of my crafting magazines and keep him supplied with loot. He’ll often show up after a mission has been completed to disassemble and salvage the junk at the mission site. That’s not my cup of tea, but it’s very impressive when a game lets you ignore one or more entire gameplay loops (especially the “core” gameplay loop) and enjoy a game your way.
The game is mostly structured around leveling up skills and improving armor and weapons that are used for combat, so after a while, especially in the endgame, people who don’t engage in combat may get bored after running out of things to do. But the fact that it can support two different playstyles for the majority of the game is amazing.
Speaking of leveling up, let me talk about the XP/perk/skill system. I’ll get into the magazine crafting system later, as I have some complaints about that. You get XP for doing various things, and you get a skill point at every level. You can spend skill points on the main attributes, and each attribute unlocks more skills as they increase. Each individual skill costs a single point, while each attribute increases in cost as you approach level 10. The skills themselves are very satisfying to use. You can spend a pretty penny to get a respec potion that resets your skills as well, which means you can try out all sorts of different builds or switch between builds based on what you’re doing. The skills more or less relate to the attribute they are categorized under, with some weird ones here and there, like cooking being under the strength attribute, along with things like swinging a sledgehammer, mining, and carrying more weight.
The usual strategy is to put a lot of points into one or two main attributes so you can afford high-level perks in one or both. If you find a lot of skills you like under one category, you can build your skills around that. My build was agility-based. The pistol skills are there, as are skills around running and shooting at the same time, jumping, and stealth. Strangely, the skill that lets you sprint longer is under Fortitude, which is annoying for my build, but I guess it’s understandable since it's in the general “health” category. I paired that with the perception ability, which gave me skills that helped with better looting, better lockpicking, better trap avoidance, and slightly more bullet penetration, which synergized well with my sneaky, fast pistol build.
The heavier pistols in the game have other armor and bullet penetration bonuses as well. This is one of many, many builds you can use that make use of and synergize well with skills from different ability categories. It’s hard to only go into one ability, and juggling your skills and abilities is a fun challenge and provides extremely unique gameplay to each player. It makes leveling up that much more exciting because you can actively feel your character getting stronger over time. There aren’t very many skills that do boring things like “x percent higher damage” or “reduce damage by x percent”. They’re mostly very unique, and some of them provide crazy unique buffs on the last level of a perk.
There are also “perks” that are different from “skills”. Perks you can get by reading certain magazines. Not crafting magazines, which make up most of the magazines in the game, but specifically perk magazines. Each series has 7 issues. Each issue gives you a unique perk in theme with the rest of the series. Once you get all seven in a series, you get a unique perk that’s usually very good. There is a series for the .44 magnum weapons, which of course I sought out. Combine the perks with the right set of skills, and you start to feel VERY overpowered. But not in a bad way. One of the best ways to design a game is to attempt to make the player feel overpowered without actually letting them get overpowered. Each time I unlock a perk, I can usually immediately make use of it or see the difference it makes in combat. It’s one of the most satisfying things in the game to go on a mission right after leveling up, upgrading gear, reading some perk magazines, and seeing the difference in effectiveness between my previous runs. Towards the end of the game (with default settings, of course), you can become a walking war machine, an untouchable zombie-killing monster, and it’s so much fun.
The aforementioned “untouchable zombie-killing monster”. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.
The armor/modifier system also adds to this, but it’s basically just skills and perks that you put on your body, so there’s not much to talk about. There are themed sets that tie in with existing weapons or builds, which is fun. Some are non-combat as well, like the farmer set, which lets you harvest more, and other things relating to farming.
I can’t comment much on the base building, but that it exists at all, I think, is a plus. It’s nice to finish a hard mission and go home and sort through all the goodies you looted, using them to improve your character's or base’s defenses. Since I don’t have much experience with building, I asked my resident builder what he thinks about the building system.
I think that the customization of block types and textures is a fantastic inclusion. Having so many options for block shapes is almost always a good thing. I could nitpick wanting more organization (subcategories for block types etc) and including more textures, but that seems like those things can just be additional fluff (or even an opening for workshop integration if that's even a possibility in the future).
I like that you have the option of placing blocks outright, or prototyping designs with the building blocks and upgrading once you're content with the construction. gives me the ability to plan buildings without having to commit to something, or expand in stages and redesign if needed later. I haven't played around with the different types of painting other than the paintbrush and the 'paint all sides' setting, so I'm not sure what the other options have to offer (paint roller & paint bucket). It seems sufficient at the moment to slap texture onto blocks so I haven't needed to dive into how those different settings are used.
The options for copying shapes already placed, copying rotation, etc., are also a very welcome inclusion. as is the ability to rotate a shape in every which way imaginable. I don't really feel limited by the building aspect overall (other than just wanting more shapes, but more is always better right?).
-blanksuspect
Horde night, which happens once every 7 days, is also quite fun, if not a bit repetitive. The best nights are ones where you are just barely surviving by the skin of your teeth. It makes for a very exciting time and keeps you on your toes as you need to improve your base before the next week. There are plenty of skills and items for defending your base in unique ways.
All in all, the good parts of 7 Days to Die are very good, and there are a lot of them. The bad parts, however, are just as numerous.
The Bad
While the game has a very solid foundation, there are cracks throughout the whole experience. I know it’s still technically in early access, but we are at the “1.0” version in experimental mode. Theoretically, this should be a beta version of the “finished product”. It feels very far from a finished product. I will go over some of the bad things, but there are too many to list in this article at once.
The magazine crafting system is a big one. You can find magazines in loot that give you one point towards a crafting skill. Each crafting skill has a certain maximum, and every few points gives you a new item you can craft or a new quality level of an existing item. If you want to craft the best stuff, you need all of the magazines for a given crafting skill. For example, tier 6 (the max tier) desert vulture pistols can only be crafted once you have read 100 pistol magazines. This is kind of annoying, especially with a team. It isn’t as bad for combat skills with a team, as you can hand off any magazines you don’t want to the people who use that, or the people who stay at the base and craft.
Some weapons just aren’t that viable for most types of gameplay, so there is less incentive to use them at all. Snipers and bows come to mind. The early-game bows are fine, but once you get into crossbows, you might as well just use guns or melee weapons if you want to stay silent. This is especially true on horde nights, where you need fast-firing, high-damage weapons, unless you build a base specifically around being able to use a crossbow effectively. There are other weapons that suffer from this as well.
I haven’t mentioned the food yet, because there’s not much to talk about. You need to eat and drink, and most food and drink gives you temporary buffs. But at the end of the day, we always end up going for the most filling items because the buffs don’t really matter. Occasionally we will make food specifically for buffs, like the pumpkin cheesecake that improves bartering, but not often. It’s a chore to eat, and it doesn’t really add anything interesting to the game. It’s not difficult to get food, but it is tedious.
The crafting system feels like it is half-baked, with strange materials being required for some items and a confusing crafting interface. Some things take way too long to make, like cement, and other things are prohibitively expensive. In the real world, roads are made with asphalt because it’s cheap and easy to mass produce. In the game, you can mass produce cement for much less resources than asphalt, but it takes a really long time. So if you want to make a Really Big Road™, either you have to go mining for a ton of oil shale, spend several real-world days crafting cement, or fill your base with a million forges to craft cement in parallel. All of those options are annoying. There are not many ways to make crafting faster or craft in bulk that will help with large projects like this.
Aside from crafting, a lot of the base-building mechanics are janky and hard to use. The electricity logic is unintuitive. For example, I will describe a scenario my friend went through the other day. If you have a solar bank connected to a battery bank and the battery bank connected to other things that consume power, you can’t use more power than the solar bank can provide by itself because it takes priority over the battery bank, even if you put a second battery bank in between as a buffer. So batteries can’t be used for “high power usage” mitigation. The solution was to connect the solar bank to a timed relay that turned on during the day so the solar bank could charge one of the battery banks, then switch it off at night so one battery bank could charge the second battery bank.
One of the worst things I encountered in this game are the birds. Now, I first fought the birds on foot. I noticed how fast they flew. They could catch up with me on a bike. “That’s reasonable," I thought. When I upgraded to a minibike, they could also catch up with me, but a bit slower now. “Okay, we’re making progress," I thought. The next time I encountered a bird was when I had a motorcycle with an engine upgrade to increase the top speed and acceleration. I was absolutely sailing through the woods with this vehicle. Only to look behind me and see a vulture practically breaking the sound barrier. I guess the vulture had an engine upgrade too. I then learned that the devs didn’t want people running away from horde night on vehicles, so they arbitrarily increased the speed of the birds based on how fast you’re going or what vehicle you’re in.
The solution to players using the tools at their disposal to play in a way the devs didn’t like was to make birds infinitely fast, so the players couldn’t do that –not creating a new enemy, not making it really foggy, not changing zombie behavior to jump in front of you and slow you down, – but to make birds Really Fast™ (but only while you’re in a vehicle). Note that you can still outrun horde night; you just have to be on foot to do it, which is much more boring and less interesting than driving at high speeds in the middle of the night, dodging zombies. You don’t even have to be fast. Just a little faster than the zombies, which is very easy to achieve. It’s not so bad that birds are fast, but that the devs took an approach designed to specifically punish a certain set of players using a tool as it was intended to be used because they didn’t like that it could be used that way. It’s an anti-fun approach, and it really grinds my gears.
Birds aren’t real. Only government drones can fly this fast.
I could go on forever about all the half-baked, janky, unfinished parts of this game. Things like ladders not working right all the time, being unable to look down while climbing up, not having an ultra-thin building block that can be placed horizontally but having one that can be placed vertically, some building block styles being rotatable in 4 directions and some in all 6, sprinting down stairs that have rails sometimes causes you to yeet off to the side randomly because the hitbox detection on rails is horrible, and much more.
The last main point in this section is the endgame. Or rather, the lack thereof. Once you get to a certain point, your combat is maxed out for whatever build you’re going for. You can still progress in crafting, but you stop improving skills, and the gameplay stagnates. Once you unlock one trader, unlocking the others basically doesn’t change anything except a few extra items, and only if you’re lucky. The different biomes don’t really do anything. I am staying in the initial green forest and doing max-tier missions, and I have no reason to travel anywhere else unless a mission takes place in another biome.
It feels like they made a pretty fun set of features, skills, and powers, then just didn’t make any hard content for players to use all their cool abilities on. Max-tier missions are the same as any other tier, just with bigger structures, so it takes longer, and a few more zombies per room. Maybe some of the zombies are a bit harder or have irradiated variants. There’s nothing truly unique about endgame, high-tier missions. The only reason to do them is to explore the cool structures, which you can do already, get more loot from the structures, which you can also do already, and get better quest rewards. Most of the endgame loot is to make existing things easier. You get a little helicopter to fly around quickly. You get solar panels to trivialize power generation. You get a lot of money to buy respec potions and materials more easily, so you don’t have to gather as much. But there isn’t a lot that the endgame adds that is actually unique or challenging in any meaningful way.
The Ugly
I’ve talked about the gameplay mechanics I’m not a fan of, and now I also want to touch on the visuals. To be blunt, this game looks like an early-access game from 2013. It reminds me of early Rust. There are so many little things that place it solidly in that era visually that it would be hard for the game to claw its way back to modernity. The grass texture is very flat, just painted onto much of the ground. Other ground textures are the same. The actual patches of grass that pop out of the ground are perfectly lined up in a grid that is impossible to miss when you look in the right direction. Some textures are pretty sharp and good-looking, but that makes it all the more jarring when a low-resolution or stretched texture appears next to them.
There are only a handful of zombie models, and many of them exclusively indicate a certain zombie type. There is little variation. I often see the 2 or 3 of the same dead lady with the exact same color dress side by side, which, while pretty funny, does not make for an interesting and varied visual experience.
It did not take long to find an example of this in-game.
I did not have to spawn these in or search long to find an occurrence of triplets. The dye system is very strange as well. Some armor can be dyed, some cannot. There’s no telling which ones can. You often can’t even see the dye take effect in the 3D preview of your character in the armor screen, and there’s no 3rd person mode, so you can’t use that either. (There actually is, but it’s hidden behind debug commands, so I don’t really count that as a feature.)
The block placement is often buggy as well. Ground, dirt, stone, and the like will “connect” to nearby similar blocks, creating a smooth surface. This is nice in many cases, and it lets you dig and terraform somewhat nicely. But you can’t “flatten” those connections on demand. For example, if you have a 90-degree angle with dirt in an L shape, it will connect a bit diagonally in the corner. If you place an L-shaped or flat piece of wood down, the dirt diagonal connection just clips through the wood. So the solution is to dig the dirt down to a level on the edges of whatever floor you’re placing. Or to place a full wood block to cover the diagonal dirt and raise the floor a bit, but then you may need to raise the ceiling if the structure you’re building has one and you need a certain clearance. I ran into this in my tunnel through a mountain. Because the ground doesn’t snap or “fit” to the blocks you place, it can lead to awful-looking ditches on either side of a foundation or surface if you dig out one layer of ground to fill in with building blocks. The solution is to just not dig down into the ground and place everything on top, which doesn’t work for buildings with a basement or certain other situations.
The ditches on either side cannot be fixed. Ground does not connect to placed blocks.
To their credit, the devs did a lot more than I thought was possible with a voxel-based game. It doesn’t look voxel-based until you start breaking or building things, which is very impressive in its own right. But it also causes many problems that cannot be solved. I think it’s an overall positive feature, but it never stops annoying me at every turn. It reminds me of the struggle of Subnautica. The devs wanted to allow terraforming, but the performance impact was huge; you could skip entire story sections if you dug enough, and there were all sorts of clipping issues. They eventually scrapped it entirely. 7 Days to Die manages to make terraforming work well in a world that isn’t just perfect cubes, and while it does cause problems, the “terrain smoothing” function does more good than it does harm. I can’t think of another game that I’ve played off the top of my head that has a voxel world as natural-looking as this.
Yep, everything here is made out of voxels.
The Conclusion
Based on what I’ve said so far, it may seem like there are more bad things than good, and if we count them in quantity, that is likely true. But I think despite all of the annoyances, bad design choices, the lack of meaningful progress in the last few years, and aging graphics, the quality of the good parts outshines the annoyance of the bad parts. This is a fantastic game to play with a group of friends. All of my friends find something to enjoy, and we get bigger groups going for this game than almost any other game I play. I do want to note, though, that playing this game single player probably would not be much fun at all. At least for me, so much of the game would be a chore that would bring the rest of it down. There are lots of people who love doing the stuff I hate, like crafting, inventory management, and base building, so when I play with friends, I don’t have to do any of that.
Like I mentioned before, the extremely satisfying and simple gameplay loop of “blasting zombies, looting, improving your skills, improving your base, only to repeat but better this time” can keep me thoroughly entertained for many, many hours. I could imagine what the game could have been or what I want it to be, but at the end of the day, what the game actually is is a solid, laid-back multiplayer game where everyone has a role to fill and a zombie to dismember.
If you want to get the gang together and dismember some zombies yourself, the 1.0 release is just around the bend! You can read all about that update in our blog post here. And you can get your own 7 Days to Die server here!
We also have our own community server for 7 Days to Die Experimental. If you want to join us for some zombie-blasting fun, you can join our Discord server here. Hope to see you there!