I'll get this out of the way - This is a truly excellent game. All the variables, from recipes to loot tables to zombie behavior, are razor sharp in creating tension. If you're careful, and more importantly, smart, you'll have what you need to survive... barely. It's a brilliantly done system when the game has you encountering a skilled new survivor, and you have to sit and consider if your group will survive taking on yet another person's needs.
It escapes the common zombie game problem of becoming a power fantasy by constantly putting you in high-stakes situations with no right answer. How much do I need to get in that room? Can I go another night without repairing my barricades to make sure I have enough to eat? Will my best survivor, the one keeping the run going, survive the hardest locations, or should I send someone more disposable? The game can be very difficult, even unfair, and that's what makes the stress and horror work so well. I DARE anyone to play the Precinct for the first time and say they didn't start freaking out as they started to get deeper in. One of my favorite moments in a video game happened there, as SHTF and I became acutely aware of being in the basement.... sprinting out of a building, shattering doors and taking chip damage had the same feeling you get watching a slow scene in a horror movie. I love this game.
That's not to say it's perfect, and I hope some things get changed and improved before release. As others have said, the combat is terrible. For such high stakes situations where they make you consider every variable, the combat collisions are too unreliable to work well. The game incentivizes you avoiding combat, while making it unavoidable in nearly every location, so wonky combat isn't a reasonable excuse. I've lost entire runs because a key character had their weapon phase through a zombie because their momentum carried them too far. Sometimes even a single zombie can stunlock you with repeated hits, preventing you from dodging or doing anything else. Again, bad combat in a game like this can be fine -- as long as the rules are consistent. Losing hours of gameplay because of a bad animation sucks.
And some nitpicks: Carrying a gun still forces you to give up an important inventory slot to the ammo loaded in your current magazine, which is just silly. Transferring bases is a pain, not because you need to clear out the shelter again to use it, but that you need to go back to your current base to begin a new day so you can immediately move to the shelter you just cleared at the map table. You can't have anything queued up when you move, so there's no reason not to simply have a "Move in" option that advances the day as soon as you clear it. I've had morale losses because I returned from preparing to move into an empty shelter and "had a bad scavenging haul."
All in all, the devs are doing a great thing here. The art style and zombie designs are fantastic, and the environmental storytelling is well done. I look forward to the finished product.
