Recent reviews by Connan♥

It’s a fun game with the potential to become a truly great one.

The gunplay, zombies, and progression are solid. The game offers both horde and boss mechanics in certain areas. It’s an open-world experience focused on looting, with special zones where bosses spawn and provide better rewards. This pushes the player to take more risks and hunt for better gear. There’s also a leveling system that helps make the otherwise grind-heavy looting more engaging. Random events appear as well, but they mostly boil down to going somewhere, killing enemies, and looting bodies and containers. Still, the game provides options that allow players to adjust difficulty for either challenge or convenience, and these are fully accessible during early access.

Vehicles are fairly rare early on, but become easier to find later.

A major issue right now is base building. While the system is polished and functional, bases feel almost pointless because zombies currently don’t pose any ongoing threat. There’s no chance of a wanderer or a horde attacking; every time you load into a save, loot, zombies, and interactables are completely respawned. Instead of feeling rewarding, it becomes repetitive and frustrating. You can place a base flag that stops zombies from spawning inside your base — but because infinite zombies require infinite ammo, you’re almost forced to repeatedly loot the same containers. You can mark containers as storage to prevent loot respawning, and I used this in my base to avoid abusing the system, while keeping one container that spawned fuel. Still, both loot and zombie spawning need a rework. Project Zomboid handles this perfectly: areas can be cleared, but hordes eventually form and move. This game would instantly improve if there were more zombies overall, but they didn’t constantly respawn in the same spots. Early game becomes frustrating when you clear a road, take a break, and return to find everything respawned.

When you die, you can either respawn at your bed or reload your save. This system is fine in theory, but it gets difficult when zombies have all respawned while your best gear is on your corpse. Some areas also require keycards, and doors can close again after you respawn. I nearly soft-locked myself late-game in the hardest area because I died inside it — everything respawned, I only had 20% of my ammo left, and the only way forward was deeper. Fortunately, I had hoarded enough supplies to survive.

I’ve played Project Zomboid, Rust, and DayZ, and this game successfully borrows good concepts from all three, but hasn’t fully developed them yet. That’s perfectly understandable for a solo-developer early access project priced at €11. I still think it’s absolutely worth the money — I finished one playthrough and spent over 30 hours doing it.

So what would make it worth €40? Here are the main improvements I would love to see:

• Make bases meaningful. The systems exist — electricity, turrets, building pieces — but a single door currently has the same gameplay purpose as a complex compound.
• Improve zombie spawning. Replace instant respawns with dynamic hordes that react to player activity and can attack (and damage) bases later in the game.
• Expand quest variety, rewards, and trading systems (which are already being worked on).
• Add multiplayer. With vehicles, base building, and special zones, this would be amazing with friends. Zombie numbers should scale, e.g., +50% per additional player.
• Add more weapons, clothing, and map areas. I explored nearly everything in under 40 hours at a normal pace.
• Support modding or community assets (with permission). This would help a solo developer manage a game with this much potential. We’ve seen dev blogs, but no major updates yet; community help could accelerate growth.