7 Days to Die Review. Bury This Game Deep in Your Junk Files

7 Days to Die is supposed to be a horror-filled, adrenaline rushing combat affair. However, this game fails in all the major facets that make great combat games.

Graphics: 3.0

I’m completely not a fan of the graphics, and even the excuse that this was ported from PC doesn’t hold up. The framerate is abysmal, and some of the landscapes and characters look so bad that you’d be tempted to think you were testing an alpha version. You also encounter multiple glitches with the graphics. Killing zombies, which should be brutally fun, has been devolved to casual mechanics that don’t live up to the expectations.

Gameplay: 2.0

The game is set in post-apocalyptic Earth in a town called Navezgane, Arizona. After a nuclear third world war destroys a significant portion of the Earth’s population, you are left to survive and fend off zombie hordes that want to rip your flesh out. You must look for food, shelter, scavenge for other supplies and keep on the move from hordes of the undead that want a piece of you.

You can build up structures based on physics mechanics and also have to constantly search for new tools to replenish the supplies. You can hunt wild animals for food, but you also run the risk of attracting zombies which can detect the smell of meat that you carry around. The zombie masses usually attack your current location in their throngs on the 7th day of the current in-game time, so you have to prepare sufficiently for that inevitability.

You can also choose to play the co-op mode on hosted servers or locally.

Controls: 3.0

The game’s PC background can still be seen even on console, and you have to constantly drag your feet when moving around with a gamepad or selecting items from inventory. I did find that some of the Xbox controls were unresponsive, but generally, most of them work fine. The basic options are shooting and building structures, and you can use LT/RT buttons for primary and secondary actions, the left stick for movement and various action buttons for shooting or completing structures.

Replay Value: 2.0

The whole shebang is terrible, starting from the poor graphics, uninspired melees, repetitive actions to a generally poor landscape that you wouldn’t enjoy coming back to. The game doesn’t have a storyline and anything to work towards other than survival. But even if it did, this game is poorly developed. It lacks character investment, a wide variety of combat options or any kind of riveting action and the horror expected of this genre that would make me want to replay the game.

Conclusion

This game is laden with poor controls, little character development, terrible graphics and too many awkward glitches that make one wonder why it ever left the beta testing phase in the first place. The battle mechanics are brutally awful, and there is no pun intended in that statement. The screeching of the zombie hordes lacks basic inspiration, and it just sounds like someone is gagging on an oversized salad.