Dropped weapons fall through the ground, enemies clip through walls, doors, and floors, and some systems are outright broken. Unfortunately, this compelling premise is undermined at every turn by its abysmal technical situation. The properly-prepared survive, and the unprepared are devoured. Why the fort? Apart from shelter, a huge wave of powerful enemies will descend upon the area, testing every defense players have built and every survival technique they’ve learned.

Play largely revolves around keeping those meters filled by scavenging while still making enough time to construct and reinforce a proper fort by week’s end.

The other mechanics are fairly typical for the survival genre, featuring constantly-dwindling meters of hunger, thirst, fatigue, and temperature. The act of assembling the fort in particular feels satisfying, scratching that good old Minecraft itch by conveying a real feeling of accomplishment and purpose in a game that otherwise has little narrative or story-based motivation. Players cobble together everything they need to live from resources found about the landscape, assembling gear from recipes and snapping together pre-built parts to form various forts. Putting aside issues the technical (and possibly ethical) issues, however, does reveal a reasonably engaging - if largely unoriginal - core of play.ħ Days To Die revolves around a weekly cycle of crafting-focused survival in a nondescript wilderness teeming with hostile mutants. I imagine that paying customers would feel like they’ve been had if they bought this game for full price, and I wouldn’t blame them. While that certainly plays a part in this odd turn of events, it isn’t a good excuse for the state of this release, and it feels outright deceptive. Unlike Xbox One or Steam, Sony has no formal early access program. The fact is, 7 Days is nowhere near complete and barely even qualifies as stable, but is being sold on PS4 as a final product. While they’re not the only ones doing it, titles like DayZ, H1Z1, Ark: Survival Evolved, and RUST most visibly represent the practice of selling a game that is still in active development, inviting players to both fund that development and be party to all the changes, refinements, and mistakes that the developers will make on the way to the “true” release. It might work for some, but this ends up a real problem for 7 Days To Die. If there was ever a genre that could serve as the poster child for early access, it’s the open-world survival game. WTF This game is nowhere near complete, but is being sold as final! LOW …as well as the things that make survival sandbox games a tedious, buggy chore. HIGH An interesting microcosm of all the things that make survival sandbox games a good time…

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