7 Days to Die Review

There’s no real story in 7 Days to Die, and that’s why it gets a 1 for story. But it is a 4 overall, and I’ve put 691 hours into it and still don't consider it complete. Just one more Horde night, they say.....

7 Days to Die is a zombie survival game. You build a base to defend yourself, and every seven days a horde turns up to test it. Seven days is the default, and you can change it in the settings, and my god, there are now a lot of settings. I am now playing on the latest version 3.3.0, and there is a setting for everything! Want extra XP on kills? Sure. More resources? Sure, Harder Zombies? Sure, we can do that too!

I’m weird, because I like the grindy bits. I like heading out to collect resources. The real “one more day” hook is the preparation, though. You wait for something to finish crafting, or you need one more skill book to level up and unlock the motorbike. Everything you do is aimed at the next Horde Night; there are ways to cheat the horde night, but that's not what we are here for. We are here to survive folks, and be damned; that is what we are going to do! So go gather those resources and start building your ultimate horde base, traps and all. You heard me, TRAPS. All kinds of them: blade traps, electric fences, dart traps and turrets ranging from shotgun to full M60 turrets! All of which need to be hooked up with your trusty wire tool and plumbed into the battery banks. Don't forget, though, you need to charge these batteries, so we are going to need a generator, or if you want to keep it green, then let's get some solar panels. Zombies have decent pathfinding and will always look for the weakest point so you need to make sure your base is fully repaired before each horde night, or you might find yourself in trouble. And I know what you're thinking: just build up and sit on a platform? Well, sadly that won't work either, as the game has structural integrity, so as soon as a pillar is destroyed, everything above comes tumbling down with it.

My cousin and I currently play; we are doing well, and we divided tasks up between ourselves. I was armour and gathering, and he was all out tanking and guns. You look at skill books that increase your ability for that skill, so we divided these up based on what we are focusing on. But yeah, we thought we were prepared for our first real Horde Night, but boy, were we wrong. A demolition zombie appeared, and we triggered the explosion on his chest by accident (If you hit the red light on him, it triggers the bomb!), and it blew a massive hole in the side of our kill chamber. Now all the other zombies started just digging underground, and by the time the night ended and we had cleared up, they had dug an ungodly big hole beneath our base!

The traders give you missions, but they’re all fetch or kill variations: go to this place, bring this back, shoot these. There’s no progression beyond getting harder missions. It’s just survival.

The other biomes are the real danger if you level up too fast. The wasteland has a difficult POI with a massive horde at the end. If you aren’t ready, you’ll die, and if you die, you fail the mission. I’ve been stuck in a death cycle there, fighting through zombies to get my bag back, never getting to the loot room.

I mean, all in all, this is a blast, even if there is no real story to it other than surviving the nights. I could go on and on about this, but I am sure if this is the kind of game you like, you already know what it is about. If you like killing zombies, crafting, gathering and base building, then this is certainly for you. I could go on for hours about this game. And probably would, given half the chance. I have already recommended it to friends at work and am restlessly waiting for the next time my cousin is around so we can continue our game.

If you decide you want to give this a go, I highly recommend checking out IzPrebuilt on YouTube. I watch a lot of their videos, and some of the guides on there are great help when starting out.