There are so many wonderful horror games out there, and we don’t believe they should be kept to just one month, so we’re continuing
our Mansion of Evils for the foreseeable future. This edition, we’ll be reviewing Night of the Dead.
Preface: We ran into Night of the Dead
during the steam sale over the Halloween
season. It didn’t look, at first glace, like much,
but one review caught our eye. “It takes 7D2D
to the next level.”
We’ve had our love affair with 7daystodie,
through many iterations, success and failures, and it has it’s
charms. Though this game seemed to promise a version that
mimicked what the people really wanted.
So curiosity won the day and we tried it.
Premise: Lucy wakes up from a human experiment and gets trapped
in a city covered with zombies. She must survive nightly zombie waves
and communicate with a group of survivors to escape from the isolated
area.
Gameplay: This is a survival, crafting, horde defense style game. Each night
you’re hit with a wave of trouble, and each day is your chance to prepare
your defenses and gather your resources.
This is an early access game, which means it is still being developed,
though, the developers seem committed and driven. Despite this,
the ratings are still fantastic, Mostly and
Very Positive rating from users.
Why we like it: Whoever said it was 7D2D but done right, we generally
have to agree. We enjoy the way levels are given – there’s experience points to
help you boost your personal stats and research points to help you
improve in other areas and increase functionality and capabilities of your
defense.
We like the way the horde happens nightly, it seems more realistic.
Gathering materials also seems to make more sense as you’ll find metal
where metal exists, rubber from rubber, and so on.
There are lots of defensible pre-built structures that can benefit the player
early on. Not to mention you have the ability to completely customize your
gameplay to suit yourself and your friends.
Love, love, LOVE the amount of traps that can be used. The diversity makes
it even more fun to lure zombies to their death. And they aren’t set it and
forget it, you’ve got to repair and recharge between onslaughts.
Areas of improvement: Can be a bit laggy now and again, even on
higher powered machines. Most of us had to turn our settings to ensure
smooth gameplay.
The starter quests are a bit frustrating. You have to do them in order or they
don’t count, and EACH person on your team seems to need to do the same
quests. Can be challenging as resources are precious, so it’s important to find a large enough
space to get setup in, or you’ll be relocating fast.
It would be better if everyone in the team contributed to
the tasks and all got the benefits of it. If there are 4 people, why the hell do I
need 4 of everything? Seems wasteful.
The AI won’t particularly wow you right now, but that’s to be expected. So far
this is shaping up to be something special. In many ways it’s something
akin to The Forest mixed with Valheim. Which both of those games we do
greatly enjoy, so the bias resides there.
Final Rating: 4.5/5 Fingers
We consider this finger licking good. Really fun game so far and quite easy
to get into (surprisingly straightforward crafting for once). The pacing is good,
the game is good, it’s always being developed (with an update as recently
as October 28th)
It’s currently available on Steam,
check it out -> HERE.