CasaRomeo 7 Days to Die Review

I’ve been playing the game on and off since 2013 and I cant give it a positive review at this point. I experienced the game from Alpha 3 onwards and loved features like the 600-point skill-based leveling it encouraged teamwork and specialization to earn quality armor and tools. The fast, terrifying zombie AI, especially in dark tunnels, made every base defense a fun challenge. Nighttime was truly a threat, and biomes felt distinct and dangerous. Sadly, I haven’t touched the game much in almost three years because since Alpha 15, the game has been steadily simplified. The biomes lost their unique identity—wastelands no longer punish you, winters aren’t as deadly without top gear, and deserts aren’t nearly as unforgiving. The thrilling gameplay loop of building outside the woods or fearing zombies at night is gone. Zombies are now bullet sponges requiring dozens of headshots, which I find frustrating. Of course you can get better weapons to midigate that but still, there comes another problem, the loot. Weapons had a vast variety of quality and that goes back to the skillbased perk system, it got dumbed down and unified and not in a good way. The expirience of finding a good weapon is almost gone because of that. The raritys are dumb down to reflect the new and in my opinion worse leveling system and so on. Most of the excitement is gone. The game revolves too much around the 7th-day hordes, and early base defense boils down to dealing with screamer zombies. You can now build in towns from day one, removing the rewarding progression of surviving to enter safely. The skill system is watered down to farming XP for points rather than meaningful choices. The AI is easy to manipulate, with zombies coming only from one direction on day 7 and always targeting the player instead of attacking your base randomly. And after 8 years, they had their first townhall meeting some of this got adressed not even close to all of it. But they prettymuch said we are at fault and now the bandit update gets delayed. And no word about the progression or leveling system at least nothing meaningfull. I’m not ranting out of hate—I genuinely liked the game and logged over 150 hours across versions, and that are rookie numbers. But the magic that made it great is fading. If the gameplay loop isn’t engaging, no amount of marketing or graphics can save it. Look at Project Zomboid—graphically simple but constantly growing because the gameplay remains solid. I hope 7 Days regains its spark someday, but for now, it feels like a shadow of its former self.