7 Days to Die

7 Days to Die is a post-apocalyptic survival game, during which players must craft shelters and horde resources in order to survive waves of undead enemies. The game is a combination of traditional survival gameplay and something akin to first-person tower defense, all seen through the lens of a horror film. The game is meant to be played cooperatively with other players but may be played solo. Review: 7 Days to Die is an interesting look at what can happen when a good premise meets bad implementation. It's one of the countless games that's been released in the survival genre since it became popular, but it mixes the fairly standard mechanics with that of a zombie movie. You'll still spend most of your time hunting around for supplies in the game, but you'll find the usual routine has a very strict time limit. Once that's up, you'll have to hope that all of your preparation was enough to hold off waves of an undead horde. Your reward for survival is getting to do it all over again. The ideas behind the game are fantastic. The implementation, however, can only charitably be called flawed. The game is full of bugs, ranging from jerky animation to unexpected crashes. Nothing here works, not like it should - and that's horrible in a game that really relies on immersion to work. Even if the bugs could be ironed out, the game would still wallow in its own flaws. The survival loop in the game is too slow to really enjoy more than once, so there's rarely a good reason to go through more than one week. The best way to look at 7 Days to Die is as a collection of poorly-implemented ideas. There's a lot to like here if it all worked as it should. As it stands, the most that fans of the novel ideas can hope for is that another publisher picks up on those ideas and puts them in a much better game. As it stands, 7 Days to Die just isn't the kind of game that it tries so hard to be.