I had my concerns going into this review of 7 Days to Die on Xbox One mainly due to the PC version still being in an Alpha stage whilst for consoles it has received a full retail release both digital and as a physical disc. The question in my mind was if this was still in Alpha for PC, would this really be the best version of the game that has been brought to console both in gameplay and stability, well it was not too long before that question was answered.
7 Days to Die is an open world crafting game, where you the player are played in an environment without clothes, weapons or tools with the single aim of surviving. In a similar gaming style to Ark Survival Evolved, you must gather materials in order to make clothes, tools and weapons and set up a home or base to provide shelter. Instead of dinosaurs, 7 Days to Die has a far more menacing threat to your survival, Zombies. The world is set in a post apocalyptic world where zombies now roam the wilderness looking for survivors and what makes this game stand out is that on every 7th day, the player will be made to survive a full on zombie horde attack. You have 7 days to prepare for this attack by building defences, weapons and armour for yourself. Survive and you will earn another 7 days before the horde attacks again but becoming stronger each time. The 7 days becomes a battle to survive on its own as you must find food, water as well as explore and scavenge the land to find the materials you need.
The game features both a solo mode and a multiplayer mode in which you join a world inhabited by other players and you can either join to form an alliance to build and try to survive as a team or group. Before stepping into that mode I wanted to try and get to grips with the gameplay itself so I ventured into the solo world first in an attempt to survive the first 7 days if I could. This would take several attempts to complete as each time I tried a new solo game hoping to put what I had learned on previous attempts to good use only to find that the game would not make it that easy.
Starting the game you will get to select an avatar to use, though the game is only played in first person view mode, no doubt this is an option mainly for playing in a multiplayer world but it does allow some form of personal customisation of your character if only in choosing a default preset character but you can name them, I simply called each of my attempts Dave. When you first appear in the world the game will offer you a very basic tutorial in how to find materials and craft the very basic items you will need to survive such as gathering fibre from destroying plants to make fibre clothing to keep warm, to scavenge wood and small stones to build your first tools and weapons; stone axe, wooden club and wooden bow and arrows. Sadly though whilst the tutorial starts off pretty straight forward, it is curtailed by the fact the overall crafting and menu system is very much designed for a keyboard and mouse, and whilst in Ark Survival Evolved they made the effort to modify it for a console controller, 7 Days to Die has done very little other than added D-Pad shortcuts once an item is selected to speed things up.
I take issue with tutorials that require the player to look outside the game in order to work out how to play, and sadly 7 Days to Die is such a game. I am all for a game not to offer too much hand holding during gameplay, but in a tutorial for a game that features a complex crafting system, I have no problem if the game tutorial tells you exactly what to do such as the tutorial step to build three wooden frames and to upgrade them. This step will teach the player the strongest lesson in crafting yet as it will help you prepare to build, repair and make stronger your settlement. Finding the wood to craft the frames was easy but to upgrade them is something the tutorial feels you as the player should already know so at no time does it bother to simply say “hold Left Trigger to upgrade” when having the stone axe equipped, so for a good 30 minutes I was absolutely baffled until I accidently used the LT and low and behold, I upgraded the frames. This frustration continues all the way through crafting as the longer you survive the more advanced in crafting you become so you can start to build better quality tools and weapons as well as more advanced building components. The menu system is not fun to navigate on a pad and just feels as though it includes too many steps which are naturally not an issue for the speed of a keyboard and mouse but are glaringly apparent when using a console controller.
Once you have the basics down it is time to get to work, but thankfully in the solo mode you will find a battered house right near to where you first spawn, providing a almost ready made shelter for you to start off using. I say almost ready because the house will be rather battered and broken after clearly being used by a previous survivor who failed to well…survive. This is the perfect opportunity to put what you did learn in the tutorial to good use as you start to repair the house in order to make it secure if only for the time being. Reinforcing the doors and walls is a must and all this will take up at least the first two days but it will be worth it. Set down a bed roll and should you die you can respawn right on it so having a storage chest with spare tools, clothing and materials is a good idea so when you do respawn you can use that kit to prevent missing a step. If you die, anything you are carrying including clothing warn will go into a back pack, which you can retrieve from the location you died, but depending on how far you have perhaps traveled from your base, could be more of a risk to go and get rather than simply having spares ready to equip back at base.
The need to source food, water and materials is for me the most vital part of the game, if you do not eat you will starve, do no drink and you will die of dehydration. Exploring the land will lead you to finding other settlements which you can loot to try and find supplies as will finding wildlife that you can hunt and kill for food resources. Sadly cooking food is a rather complicated system here whereby in order to use the campfire you can build to make food, you must first find a cooking pot or grill to cook any meat you might find or to cook up a drinking recipe. Now you can use a forge to create these but this is something I was never able to craft in my first week, and in just a few days the need for food and drinks will become paramount. If you can find a campsite you are more likely to find a cooking pot or grill that you can use, and once equipped to your campfire you will see recipes of what you can cook from the items you have on the left. But you can find bottled water and canned food from looting and even Zombies may carry this so if you kill them you can retrieve them for your use.
There is a real tension at times as you try to survive; encountering zombies in the wild during the day is very different from encountering them at night. During the day zombies are slower, walking rather than running and are less aggressive although still dangerous. At night they become much faster and more hostile, so planning when to explore will be a huge factor in how you go about surviving and I found myself exploring and savaging during the day but retreating to my base at night, building items through the night as sadly the game has no option to sleep so you are awake the whole time so filling those night time hours is key as you wait for the sun to rise.
As my first 7 days progressed I learned more and more about how the game worked and how to prioritise jobs I wanted to complete during each day as I prepared for the horde on the 7th day. Using a day to gather materials to build stronger defences for the some such as wooden spikes and to craft better tools and weapons whilst the next day I would use to go exploring the local area to find food and water but always being mindful to return to my base before sun down. It can be a struggle trying to find food and water just as it is to defend against the wandering zombies you encounter. On my 5th day I got too cocky and ventured too far from my home base carrying my best armour and weapons and fell to a zombie group as their hits caused me to bleed and without a bandage and already at low health, I bled out and died. Sadly I was unable to retrieve my backpack so I lost all tools, weapons, clothing and armour as well as the food and water I was carrying. This meant I had to use the 6th day to recraft all my basic gear hence the lesson learned about crafting spares to keep at my base just in case. This is all part of learning how this game works and so every mistake is a good chance to learn and adapt for next time. After six hours of gameplay I found myself in day 7, which after losing my best weapons such as a sniper rifle and first aid kits, I now had little choice other than to put up defences around my house and try to ride out the horde that way. I built rows of wooden spikes surrounding the house 5 rows thick and luckily I had spent the first couple of days upgrading the walls to the house as well as building a second floor area so that if the worst came to the worst, I could retreat there, destroy the ladder and just hope to survive that way. Although cowardly it proved a success as at 22:00PM on the 7th day, they came. The sound of the zombies trying to get into the house was amazing to hear, even if the zombie sounds used sounded more like a certain monster from the film Weird Science than anything really scary. The horde managed to fight their way through 5 rows of thick wooden spikes and started to break into the house by breaking through the walls. From my 2nd floor I was able to take out a good few using my bow and arrows but I was amazed at just how far this horde had managed to get despite my defences. Around 3am game time the horde was defeated, zombie corpses scattered on the ground and I waiting till sunrise before descending down.
To see an entire back corner of the house I had prepared just destroyed showed me just how dangerous the 7th day attack was. Knowing that I had another 7 days to prepare for the next attack, an attack that would be more difficult as it would have even more zombies attacking me gave me a real appreciation as to what it takes to survive in this game. I felt a real sense of achievement for having survived the first 7 days, and having learned a great deal about how the game worked I was excited to take up the challenge again and prepare for the next horde attack and immediately set to work repairing the house, rebuild my defences and was set to do it all over again and I was looking forward to it.
The gameplay really is very satisfying once you have a good handle on how it all works and it is a game that does suit console play, but in that lies my biggest criticism of this game. I firmly believe that 7 Days to Die should have gone into the preview programme instead of a full blown retail release and I will explain why. Right now the visuals are insufferably basic, like the PC version on minimum specs. This is not a good looking game at all, and does nothing to test the power of the Xbox One in anyway which is a disappointment. The animation of the zombies is more comical than scary, which is highlighted when in combat and you are smacking them in the head with a wooden club only for the zombies to show no hit detection until they suddenly fall stunned, and that is if they even fall at all as I have landed headshots with an arrow that gives me the option to loot the body but that body is still standing straight up and looking at me before disappearing suddenly. When the zombie horde did attack the frame rate dropped to shocking levels even though I couldn’t see the zombies from where I was, the engine simply struggled to deal with this amount of action and this is worrying as I know future hordes grow in number.
It all sadly feels as though the game is not quite ready to justify the £29.99 release price both digital and retail the game launched with. Ark Survival Evolved is still in the preview program, and is consistently being improved with updates along with the PC version, but this game feels as though it is still in a preview level with its many bugs and average quality visuals and sound to really say it was good enough or work was done to the console version to put it out there as a retail version that is ready to go. The gameplay is fun, the tension of trying to survive is attractive to me following Ark but it just doesn’t have that polish it should have for me.
7 Days to Die is fun to play, both solo but especially when teaming with other players all looking to survive, it offers enough gameplay to make investment of time in it worth while and after a few slow starts I found myself learning enough to feel some sense of confidence in playing the game to get the best out of it. But with its issues and poor visuals and sound, I would recommend those interested in picking this up to wait for a sale and price drop. The wait could help with updates to improve the stability and build of the game whilst the price drop will give it a price more palatable.
