This is a hard review for me to write. I've put a good amount of time into this janky, fun game over the past decade. In the time this game has taken to make moderate changes, I've become a different person, moved to another city, and moved in with my long-term partners, and now we all play this game together. And I still don't think I can recommend it with my chest. So I guess... let's start with the good.
I adore crafting in this game. The crafting is, basically, "Hit button to craft," but there are so many different crafting "tables" in the game that a good session has me bouncing from station to station over several minutes, waiting for my various tables to craft all the things I need. It's unironically a ton of fun (even if the UI is hot garbage). Most of my time spent in this game has been mining and crafting, which is exactly how I want it. Other good things: The game is fairly generous, and you can get pretty granular with the server settings, down to adjusting how plentiful items are and how plentiful (or scarce) certain essential resources are. I enjoy the updates made to the visuals, although overall there is a strong visual design language that could be boiled down to "mud." And the rhythm of the 7 day structure is very fun, especially for a zombie game. Getting attacked by a huge horde every night would get old in this kind of game really quickly. But getting attacked every 7 days (and you get to control how long the days are, in the aforementioned settings) is just about the sweet spot. You get to do whatever for 7 days, then batten down the hatches for the huge horde. It's great.
And the bad. The game is only *technically* in full release. It released its 1.0 update so that it could release on certain other platforms that don't allow Early Access. And if that was all, I wouldn't care! But the game is NOT at a 1.0 level of polish. Every single time you play, you will encounter a new bug. One of my partners clicked on a destroyed truck, and a chunk of the ground despawned under him. We put water in a sink, and when we walked outside, the water had poured through a wall and was just aimlessly, endlessly spilling down a hill. My other partner broke a fence, on the ground, that wasn't attached to any part of a house, and a piece of the house broke off (technically, this isn't a bug, it's just kinda stupid). And this is not touching on the thiiiiick amount of jank the game has. Don't get me wrong: I love jank. I play Early Access games all the time, and I have to live with the consequences of my actions. And 7 Days has polished away a surprising amount of that jank. But the problem is that the game is practically *built* on jank, and so any aspect they polish really just shows how janky the rest of the game is. Signs don't rotate when you're placing them when you press the rotate button... you have to press the OTHER rotate button, which is not on the mouse. Zombies can see the "heat" you generate from literally any distance, and with default settings that includes being able to dig down several stories to get to where you're like, cooking food or forging iron. Zombies have inconsistent rules regarding their pathing, and with how they interact with basic physics. I could go on for hours.
The game is simultaneously one of the best examples of the zombie survival-crafting genre AND one of the cautionary tales of gaming. It's great, and I kinda hate it, and I'll probably play it again tomorrow.
