HumanitZ wants to be the isometric zombie survival game that finally dethrones Project Zomboid, and the foundations are genuinely there. From wilderness to dense cities, scavenging, crafting, base-building, companion animals, and a skill tree to shape your survivor all sit ready and waiting to become something special. My friends and I poured hundreds of hours into this game on the strength of that potential, extending it chance after chance, and what we got in return was an education in how thoroughly bad-balancing can sabotage good ideas.
Consider the progression, which someone presumably designed while actively resentful of the people who would have to play it. You earn a single skill point per level, and the perk that grants a whopping 10% extra health demands four of those points, meaning four full levels of grinding for a bonus so marginal you will forget you have it. Levelling itself requires thousands of experience points, while quests reward you a pitiful 300XP, so the only realistic path forward is slaughtering zeeks by the truckload. Then you die, your accumulated experience evaporates back to zero, and you discover that the standard respawn mode inflicts most of the agony of permadeath while withholding any of the bragging rights that might have justified it.
The weapons deserve their own indictment, because the game flatly refuses to tell you anything useful about them. The Lorry revolver and the Desert Vulture share an ammo type, yet there is no stat sheet anywhere explaining which one actually hits harder, leaving you to guess your way through firefights via vibes and superstition. This is a game built on combat that cannot be bothered to quantify its own guns.
The quest design, meanwhile, achieves a special kind of catastrophe. My friend lost the USB drive required to download data inside the lab, and because there is no mechanism anywhere to reset a quest, returning to the quest giver accomplished precisely nothing. His questline simply ended there, permanently bricked, for the remainder of our time with the game. Adding insult to that injury, finishing a quest does not prompt the giver to hand you the next one immediately. You have to come back tomorrow, in-game, which incentivizes plopping an outpost beside every quest giver purely so you have somewhere to stand around burning time while the game decides it is ready to acknowledge your existence again.
There is a real and frequently-lovely game flickering somewhere beneath all of this, which is exactly what makes the experience so maddening. HumanitZ had everything it needed to surpass its inspiration and chose instead to drown those ideas in bugs, baffling design decisions, and balancing math that nobody appears to have tested.
Hundreds of hours of giving It the benefit of the doubt: 3/10
