7 Days to Die

7 Days to Die is a survival and crafting game from The Fun Pimps that takes place in a semi-realistic world where you have to think about things like eating, drinking, building shelter, and crafting clothes and weapons.

Review

TL;DR: The concept is interesting, but the game suffers from poor graphics, some technical issues and a general lack of polish.

Graphics – Characters and surroundings can easily be mistaken for being from a 15-year-old game. Everything is blurred with sharp edges and the animations are choppy. The randomly generated areas are extremely flat. Prepare to see several square miles of inanimate areas that do not protrude from each other at all.

Gameplay – Fortunately, playability is not as bad as the technical parts. Your goal is simply to survive for as long as you can. As we said before, it’s not just the zombie filth that is your only problem, but you have to take into account everything in your environment. To deal with hunger and thirst, you must hunt animals, collect vegetables or search through houses for different types of canned food. The temperature is also something that you have to keep an eye on and it is important to dress for the weather. If it is too cold, make sure that you have, for example, animal skins that can warm you and if it is too warm, it is best that you find some shade. If you do not listen to your needs, your values ​​will diminish and if you continue to be ignorant you will eventually die.

Diseases and injuries are also something you have to keep in mind, during our play-throughs we died of infections, dysentery and other nasty ailments you would rather not come into contact within a world where antibiotics are rare.

Fighting is not particularly enthusing. There is only one attack to perform and if you succeed in hitting, it doesn’t feel at all satisfactory. In addition, the game controls are inaccurate and make the fights feel clumsy and repetitive.  When you can’t feel the difference between a sledgehammer and a wooden plank, you are forced to rely on the game’s awful menus to find out which weapon actually does the most damage, and you will have to spend more time in the menus than you want.

Crafting and building – However, fighting is not the only way you can survive. In 7 Days to Die, you can break down everything you find into useful resources and then make something you need. Weapons, ammunition, furniture, windows, clothing, and food can all be manufactured. You may not be able to build exactly what you want, but there’s an impressive range of options. Many have tried to survive by building indestructible forts, an understandable tactic when there is so much to manufacture.

One disadvantage of the game’s building segment is that it is grid-based, which results in you not getting exactly the design you intended. The slightly antique solution means that what could be a fun part does not quite reach its full potential.

Summary

Giving players choices is something that the developers have invested in, not only in terms of the different ways you can survive but also on a more fundamental level. You can decide how long the days or nights should be, how aggressive the enemies are, how many things you lose if you die, the effects of illnesses and much, much more. There are clearly some interesting choices to be made, but unfortunately, it’s not enough to remedy our main complaints. Multiplayer (with split-screen option) is fun, though mostly because of the game’s technical problems.

7 Days to Die lets you focus on surviving in inhospitable environments and most of this could have been entertaining if it wasn’t for the technical issues and poor graphics. Trying to survive is fun in itself if you can overlook the old graphics and the bad image update. Unfortunately, the surroundings are boring and the fighting never gets exciting which makes it all feel monotonous and repetitive after just a short while.

Linux System Requirements – Minimum (Recommended)

OS: Ubuntu 16.04 64-bit (18.04)
CPU: 2.4 GHz dual-core (3 GHz quad-core)
RAM: 8 GB (12 GB)
Graphics: 1 GB VRAM (2 GB VRAM)
Storage: 12 GB available space

The game is available on Steam.