7 Days to Die Review

"A Horrible Apocalypse"

Campaign

Simply put, 7 Days to Die is absolutely appalling on the console being one of the worst titles I've ever played. Not only does it present an aged world, it has poor performance and a pitiful draw distance at all times. I felt as though I was playing a game on mobile that I've dialed back the render distance to minimum which was disgusting to witness.

The game also doesn't really have any goals to it and can't decide if it's a multiplayer survival game, a cooperative experience or a solo zombie survival. It's all basically the same whether you have other players glitching around or a horde of generic zombies sliding across the ground. The animations are incredibly stiff no matter what you do with the same zombie attacking you. I once saw five of the same zombie in a group which is purely lazy.

The world does feature a couple of biomes, but these just mold into each other roughly and all look the same with what's in them. I also wonder what a sexy nurse zombie is doing in the middle of the desert, just strange. It also just wasn't any fun as there wasn't any guided focus on what you're doing and the combat was brutally awful.

It basically came down to slugging around hoping the zombie might be taking pain. I did however like the concept of the crafting or editing of the world since that was in-depth yet poorly directed. You could dig a hole if you'd like or completely edit out areas which was neat to some degree, though with bad execution. This was done in a voxel style where you can dynamically cut up the world and this didn't match much else in the environment which made it feel odd.

Gameplay

Movement is cumbersome, it attempts to be a survival game with only health or stamina coming into direct effect with some better options based on game modification. The crafting concept is neat yet ugly, basic and hidden behind awful menus. The menu for accessing everything includes greatly detailed stats, it's just terrible to move through and crafting needed to be more centered as that's the core of the game.

The general gameplay was awful, the world was ugly and you could see it appearing with awful loading just a few yards out. There was no immersion here and it would freeze up randomly and often where the whole screen would be stuck. I don't think I've ever seen a console game with that bad of performance, it would be fine if the world was glorious yet for such an ugly view this should not be the case.

I suppose it was nice they added the choice of a random or pre-made world though with each spawn I felt the areas mostly looked the same depending on the biome. There's also splitscreen if you'd like to subject one of your friends to this. I also wanted to mention you can find animals running around though there's more of a slide to it and they all looked really bad, like 2D put together for 3D kind of the bad.

The Conclusion

7 Days to Die is a horrible game that should be skipped, hidden and locked away forever. It has no place on current generation consoles as there was no effort put in to make sure the experience was even satisfactory. The crafting and world destruction concepts were neat yet useless with menus that just didn't work well.

The gameplay was terribly boring and I can't believe how pointless it was when playing, the only bit of enjoyment was seeing the stupid zombies slide into wooden spikes I had placed. This is one of the worst games I've ever played and it truly should have been in Xbox Preview until it was ready, but I don't think any amount of updates will save this game.

7 Days to Die Review on Xbox One
Review Code Provided by Sandbox PR

Rating Overall: 1.5