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7 Days to Die
Developed by The Fun Pimps
Distributed on Steam
Not classified by the ESRB
Speaking of open world crafting survival games with zombies, 7 Days to Die! Titled like a poorly translated asian horror film, 7DtD is yet another attempt to cash in on all that sweet sweet Minecraft money. Stating my bias right off the bat, I do not understand why people like these games. I get Minecraft. Minecraft is a simple and goofy little game where everyone can make their own ideal dream habitat, where the only limit is their imagination and curved edges. Sure, Minecraft has some gamey stuff like enemies and specific pattern crafting, but it’s all very easy to figure out and play. Theres not a lot of needlessly complicated crafting trees and prerequisite items, and unless you are going to start messing around with Redstone nothing really is beyond the grasp of anyone playing it.
While less complicated than Project Zomboid, 7 Days to Die is still very complicated. I have played 7 Days to Die on and off for the better part of a year as part of my delving into various different zombie survival games, and I will say with confidence that I have not even scratched the surface of what the game has to offer. You start out with naught but your fists and a few survival items, and the game gives you a smack on the bum and some rubbish piles to search through. Everything takes time to search, with larger and more loot probable items taking more time. Piles of trash take a second, cars five, and thirty whole seconds for gun safes. Your success in 7 Days to Die will largely hinge on what you find early on. Sticking to the road and heading to the nearest landmark is generally a good idea, but since the game spawns you randomly theres no telling if the nearest landmark will be full of locked doors and zombies or guns and food.
If you do not manage to find some kind of early game axe for breaking into locked houses, you can always fashion a stone axe out of a sharpened stone, stick, and plant fibers. If you cannot seem to find a sharpened stone or plant fibers, that is because you have to craft them. To craft them, you have to put it in the crafting screen by itself and click craft. The game has an in game menu to tell you how to do this, but not a tutorial for you to figure this out, so the average player will have no idea how to get these simple and early game items.
Later items will require a similar level of commitment to figure out. Making a fire ax takes 3 sticks and 2 iron ingots. Sounds easy enough, right? Well, do you have a forge? If you cannot at this point figure out how to make a forge because it is not one of the items in your crafting menu, that is because you have not found the correct skill book to learn how to make the forge. Go find it. After you have found it, you may now start smelting an iron ingot. Just go ahead and toss in your 6 scrap iron that you found by breaking down various iron items, 6 sticks for fuel, and your iron ingot mold. Oh, you forgot about the mold? That will take 5 lumps of clay to make. Haven’t found clay yet? Well all you have to do is find one of those valuable water sources and just search around until you find some. Once you have all that in order, just do it all over again for your second ingot and you can make yourself a fire axe.
The problem with this is, in order to get a lot of that scrap iron or recipe book, you have to be able to loot houses. Houses are generally accessed by locked doors, which you can easily knock down with your trusty fire axe! Oh, how do you get in before you have the axe? Well, you could punch it for 100 years, or you could get lucky and find a fire axe randomly in the wild. That is what I mean when I saw that your early game survival is based largely on luck.
Now I know some 7 Days to Die zen master is going to come in and tell me how im just a noob that wasn’t good enough to play the game properly, and to him I say “yes, exactly.” If I have to dig through 7 pages of a wiki to figure out how to get all the things in order to build a rock tied to a stick, then I am too stupid for that game. I understand how it might sound cool to be able to break down everyday items into useful materials, and how everything can be broken down into a more base and craftable form, but this is too much. If I need to forge a pistol slide, barrel, and stock in order to make a pistol, that is too many steps. Just let me put my iron in the shape of a little gun and let me start killing things.
It is for this reason I will never see most of what the game has to offer. I will never create my own compound complete with traps and an adjacent mine shaft, because that shit would take way too much time. In Minecraft, making a safe house for the night was as simple as punching downwards and putting a block over your head. Sure, there are some unintuitive things, and it might take someone a while to figure out how to use the forge properly, but once you kind of get what you are doing you can have a functional base up and running in 15 minutes. It takes me 15 minutes in 7 Days to Die to read the wiki page on the various uses of shrubs.
So, with that in mind, I will say I did not like 7 Days to Die. Once again, if this kind of game sounds like your thing, then have at it! I certainly do not care for it. It isn’t that I don’t like these kinds of survival Minecraft clones, I just hate needless complication. The more steps you add between me and the thing I want to accomplish, the harder it is for me to keep giving a shit about it. I appreciate a challenge, but I just cannot see why I should give a shit about 7 Days to Die.
2 1/2 out of 5
Categorized:Horror Gaming News
