by Bush Leagues » Mon Jan 09, 2017 10:54 pm
I've recently starting playing Seven Days to Die, which is a zombie survival crafting game; and it's honestly a bit outside my usual wheelhouse. I don't mind zombie games in general, but have only played a few, and only one I've enjoyed a great deal, Left 4 Dead, which is a decent FPS with a strong teamwork element. The hardest difficulty made it legitimately difficult to finish a campaign. Playing with friends was always fun; and for crafting, I've played Minecraft, for instance, but without others to play with, it kind of lacks the enjoyment I would want to invest a lot of time in it. While I think I would definitely have more fun if I had friends who played with me in 7 Days to Die, even solo is enjoyable enough to keep me coming back for now.
So the big elements of 7DtD are the crafting, survival, and RPG aspects. The crafting is actually quite deep, despite being only in an alpha version right now. There's a lot of different stuff you can make; and many recipes require specific items to do them. So, take cooking, which is pretty straightforward. First you need a campfire, which is pretty easy, just gather some rocks. But to really cook anything worth having (either boiling water to make it safe to drink or reasonable food), you need a cooking pot, which very early in the game you won't be able to craft, so you have to go scavenging for it. Then you can also find (or if it takes you a while to find, eventually make) a cooking grill, to get even better food. Then you can make advanced stuff, like bio-fuel, with a beaker as well. There's also a forge you can create that lets you turn a lot of raw materials into useful ores (iron, lead, brass, and so on) that you can use to create more advanced things.
The survival aspect is also there, and not just from the obvious threat of the zombies, either; they certainly will kill you quick if you surrounded or otherwise backed into a corner and cannot deal with many of them quickly (and it's not easy to get a gun that can handle a lot of zombies easily; you can expect to use a bow and arrows for a good while), you can die pretty quickly. But other aspects like eating and drinking have to be handled, but also weather and other health factors. So for instance, if you're stuck in the desert and don't have a good way to cool off, you can start to get overheated, and begin to experience heat stroke. If you don't deal with it some way (either finding shelter, removing or adding clothes to cool off, or drinking a beverage that will cool you down), you can overheat to the point of dying. Likewise for the snowy areas, you can develop hypothermia and die in a similar way. It can even happen in temperate biomes if you're not careful. Just last night I was exploring the area around my main base some, and was travelling through a normally temperate forest biome. Well it was raining the whole day, and I had forgotten to bring my jacket along before I left. The combination of being wet (which the game tracks), along with the colder day because of the cloud coverage made my core temperature drop very low; several times I had to stop and build a campfire because I was in danger of freezing to death. Infection (including Zombie-itis!), Dysentery, and sprained limbs are all things you also have to contend with if things go south for you, although there are ways of dealing with it; but if it's not available to you, you may have to go hunting for a solution.
Finally, the RPG elements, which surprised me in how many there are and how deep they actually go. There is a level, skill, and perk system in the game, and it offers a lot of choices in how you can build your character as you play through the game. So there are skills for virtually everything you do - using each class of weapon (blunt weapons, bladed weapons, archery, pistols, magnums, shotguns, rifles), crafting tools and weapons, crafting miscellaneous items, using mining items (like the fireaxe, shovel, and pickaxe), athletics, and so on. These all develop naturally as you use them, improving your abilities with them by some amount. These increases in your skills, along with killing enemies, all contribute toward your experience, and you level up when you get enough, giving you a number of skill points. These skill points can be spent in the skills themselves, or saved to buy perks which give various benefits. "The Survivor" perk reduces how hungry you get over time, and increases your wellness (a general measure of how healthy you are) gain from various sources. "Miner 69er" increases your effectiveness with mining tools, and so on. There are plenty of perks for combat-focused and non-combat focused characters, and so you have plenty of options, no matter what kind of style you develop.
If you're big on the survival crafting style game, this is something you would be well-served by looking into. It's still in alpha stages, but is quite functional, and if you have the chance to play with friends, I'm willing to bet it would be a ton of fun to try and survive the zombies, including the "horde attacks" that come every 7th night - hence the name of the game in the first place.
