Why do ppl hate Jones so much...

7 Days to Die

A friend recently roped me into buying a copy of 7 Days to Die, a post-apocalyptic zombie-themed Minecraft-’em-up by a developer called The Fun Pimps (no, really.) Apparently it’s been out for the PC for two years, though Steam lists it as “early access” and the dev team claims it’s still in alpha. It’s been back in the spotlight a bit on account of its recentish port (by Telltale Games, of all people!) onto the Xbox One and Playstation 4, so I decided to give it a look. It wasn’t an easy sell from the get-go; I find zombies an incredibly stale concept. I mean, George A. Romero, the grumpy godfather of this grisly subgenre, only ever intended them to serve as a vehicle for an anti-consumerist critique of American culture, but somehow everyone missed the memo and elevated the concept of “zombies” from heavy-handed metaphor to boring pop culture icon. I just don’t understand their appeal as horror genre staple; they’re not sexy like vampires, they’re not unknowable like ghosts or demons, there’s not the uneasy sense of verisimilitude surrounding them that there is about serial killers. Barring an atavistic return to their to their roots as social criticism, like the first Dead Rising game almost managed, way back in the beginning of Xbox 360 era, or being played with a heavy dose of comedic self-awareness, as in the wonderfully dumb movies Dead Snow or Zombieland, I’m of the mind that zombies should be left, well, dead. But you can enjoy a game for its mechanics and execution even if you don’t particularly care about its setting, which is the consideration which led me to buy Sid Meyer’s Railroads, way back when, and which now led me to consider 7 Days to Die. The game is a sandbox survival game which cribs heavily from Minecraft. As in that game, you need to gather raw materials to craft constructions and weapons, but there’s also a heavy survival focus: you need to find food and water, heal injuries, regulate your body temperature and so forth. And, of course, there are zombies. Every seven in-game days, a horde of them shows up and sets about undoing all the building and healing you’ve been up to the last while. So far, so good, conceptually speaking: I like a good survival scrounger every now and then, and I have played a positively shameful amount of Minecraft. Taking all this into account, I decided to give the game a try. After all, it was on sale for only 10€, and I reckoned I could extract at least a few hours’ worth of fun. How bad could it be? In a word: bad. In more words: really really awfully catastrophically horribly bad. The game’s conceptually functional gameplay is hobbled from the start by a spectacularly unintuitive interface. It is just indescribably awful. Minecraft clearly set the standard for this kind of thing, with its neat little crafting window. Other games with crafting interfaces which I’ve played, like ARK: Survival Evolved or even Fallout 4 or Alien: Isolation, manage well enough. The key is that the system be either intuitive to use (Minecraft) or clear on what it wants from you (ARK: Survival Evolved;) 7 Days to Die is neither. One gathers supplies that may or may not be worth anything in the vague hope that some combination of them do something - the game, of course, won’t tell you, so you’re going to be doing a lot of trial-and-error experimenting. The entire process - crafting, inventory, everything - is managed through a series of arcane and foreboding menus that I needed to spend a good hour reading about online before I could hope to navigate. I am in no way exaggerating when I say that I’ve read medieval manuscripts in dead languages that are more user-friendly than this game. That the interface should be so terrible was foreboding indeed, but I’ve put up with worse - specifically, From the Depths. In that game’s case, the sheer joy of assembling your own fleet of warships was able to overcome the dreadful Excel-spreadsheet-as-designed-by-a-lunatic menus. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for 7 Days to Die. The gameplay itself is completely devoid of interest. You run around a dreary landscape, occasionally punching or scrounging about in ruined buildings for supplies, and are rewarded for your efforts with an occasional point-and-click battle to the death with eight or ten identical zombies. Gathering materials is a deathly boring grind and the combat is hardly more sophisticated than that of Minecraft. All of which are criticisms that I could level at ARK: Survival Evolved, but at least that game has color and imagination and beautiful landscapes and dinosaurs. 7 Days to Die is just dull and brown and lifeless. A final note: the game is both ugly and suffers from excruciatingly bad optimization. Most of the models look like they date to the beginning of the last console generation, while the art direction overall lacks any trace of personality or imagination. In a compensatory attempt to lend the turd some polish, the atmospheric effects, motion blur, HDR and other bells and whistles are all cranked up to 11, in common with a few other lackluster indie games developed in Unity I can think of. This has the net effect of making the game on its lowest graphics settings run at a shameful 25 fps or so on my laptop, which specs are well above the Steam page’s recommendations and which reliably manages to play new AAA games on medium or high settings. The gameplay is dull, the story non-existent, the menus infuriating, the art design ugly, the optimization terrible. Playing this game makes me feel like my sinuses are being filled in with concrete, but I’m too hungover to care. 7 Days to Die should be taken off life support.