While I am giving this a Thumgs Up, and I genuinely enjoy parts of it, I'd also advise caution to new players as the game does have it's quirks that to some may be very frustrating and downright "problematic".
The game has a very steep difficulty curve if you play it as it is intended.
Weapons will be rather rare unless you already know some of the games locations and which to prioritize early.
Some survivors are also downright useless in terms of the perks they provide whereas others are really good.
Combad too definitely requires getting used to but once you get a hang of it, learn to prioritize your stealth and scout approach, it is actually rather easy to deal with. Special Zombies can definitely make it a challenge tho (RIOT zombies for example are just health sponges, but grenades take easy care of them, if you don't have any, try to bait and avoid).
Initially, weapons very low durability certainly will prove a challenge for new players though.
So will food scarcity until you learn which buildings to prioritize.
There are also events that take place, such as increasing world difficulty after a while, a permanent water outage (meaning you better have a lot of bottle water ready, as you will need it for cooking), and others.
There are also still some quirks with combat sometimes feeling janky or unresponsive on dodge windows, and certainly executions making you really vulnerable to attacks, as you receive now immunity during an execution, most weapons make a lot of noise, some having really long execution animations, and you can not cancel it.
But the devs have improved A LOT, have also listened, and provide options for feedback, which they seem to respond to every now and then (once collected).
It is still rough around the edges but it is a gem, and in some ways similar to This War of Mine.
Kind of about as punishing, just in very different ways.
So if you are looking for a more fun and relaxed zombie survival game, this is not really it, altho the devs following popular request have added options to manually alter difficulties (likelihood for deep infected wounds, hunger drain rate, sleep drain rate, etc etc), if you want to build a single base, this is not your game. You will have to move eventually due to zombies besieging your base and becoming more ferocious, and because locations can only be looted within a certain range of your home base, and that range can not be extended. so eventually you gotta move on (unless you cheat).
Good game, but not everybodies basket.
