At the time of writing this review I've been playing DayZ for 3 years now (from around patch 0.42 to 0.61) and have seen every tiny thing the game has to offer. And I am sad to say that for a game I spent so many hours on I end up writing a negative review for and not recommending to anyone.
While other players will complain about the performance and such, I will like to look at another issue which basically destroyed the game.


At first, DayZ seemed like the next generation of gaming. It wasn't about killing and getting killed anymore. It was about the players and the interactions between them. A game where you have the option to kill, but you don't. It was more about interacting with the only other living humans; the players. Talking to them, befriending them, betraying them, handcuffing them, saving them, robbing them, torturing them and many other things. Most of which only limited by your imagination. DayZ represented the true face of a Zombie Apocalypse world.
But it was not just about guns, zombie and players. It represented a real survival system in the zombie apocalypse. You could hunt, pick fruit, farm by planting seeds and grow the crops and many other things. There were were also many handy things you could craft.
But all this content wasn't made in the first builds. It took 2 whole years for us to get most (and not all of) these options. After which the developers basically lost their idea of what DayZ was supposed to become.
They started adding generic worthless loot and changing the gameplay from an interactive multiplayer game to a pvp action game. Now it wasn't clothes that were being added or bugs that were getting fixed, it was just new weapons and only weapons. New patch, have this AK-74! Another patch? Here! Have this Winchester! Or this AUG! Which kind of weapon do you find deadliest? We'll bring that! Let's bring the M249 machine gun, or a bazooka! To the point where you could never worry of not having a weapon to kill someone. Slowly, DayZ changed to the game it is today. A game filled with savage players whose only goal is to kill and loot whoever they see. All those funny Youtube videos of people getting handcuffed and messed with got replaced by videos of PVP Battles. So now, all the new players are small minded people who came from Counter-Strike or Call of Duty, which means the only thing they know how to do is kill other players.
Now the funny thing is that the players are not to blame. It's the developers. What do I mean?
The developers kept releasing broken patches that were not even play-tested. One patch the food drop was dropped to something like 2% which forced the players to kill each other for food. The other patch broke the zombies so now they could knock you down in 5 hits or infect you for the rest of your life (which was also because being sick had also been broken). So players had to kill other players for better weapons. Now, you may think that a patch could not change a players gameplay, but it can. These broken patches were not fixed in the following week. No. These patches' life span was AT LEAST A MONTH. And when you're stuck in such situations, you have to adapt or you will die. A situation in which you cannot find food, are scared to death from zombies and are only presented with new guns. The only way to adapt is to start killing other players for food, guns and loot. Keep this up long enough and your players will turn into small minded savages whose only purpose is to find another player to kill and loot. EVEN if they've just spawned, have nothing but their bare hands and the other player is actually offering them help. Yeah, that kind of savage.

We now have an AUG, AKM, AK-101, AK-74, and etc. but we still have no damn use for the syringe that's been available since the first build! I can actually remember 3 items right now that could have been very useful and life saving in survival but were never worked on because apparently guns were more important. Hell, they even want to bring in a Bazooka and the SAW machine gun. How fun for a game that's about interacting with other players right? I'm sure I don't need to offer anyone help because if they want it, they're just gonna take it off my corpse.

Some bugs are neutral, meaning that they don't cause harm if left alone. But who can forget the glitchers right? Players who find their true calling in using the game's bugs and glitches to make other players' life a living hell. The most common one being the statues in town squares. To explain, there are a few statues in a few towns with a pretty big foundation. If you lie down next to it and roll towards it, you will insert the structure and will be able to see everyone on the outside. You wait for a poor player to pass by, then you simply come out by pressing V and shoot him in the back. Fun way to die huh? And that's not even the worst type of glitch. I can go on all day about all the glitches players use for picking infinite fruit in a second, duplicating their gear and etc..

I loved this game. I really did! There's a reason why I played it for 3 years. But I gotta tell ya, half of the time I bared with the game. I faced so many bugs and glitches, most of which always killed me and I still continued to play because I knew what a beautiful game this could be! But apparently the developers only cared about the money. They never cut the price in sales more than 32% for 3 years.
Between my friends I was always known as the most bugged player ever. Because apparently you're not supposed to go fishing. You're not supposed to go hunting either. No, you're only supposed to pick up guns and kill other players. F*ck survival right? A game that's about surviving in the zombie apocalypse has all its survival mechanics bugged to hell, but all its guns work as if they had just been cleaned and oiled by an army officer a minute ago.


Fun fact: Dean Hall the lead of the development team climbed mount everest twice but didn't finish the game. Not only that but he actually left the team! After which another guy took his place who tried to do the right thing but realized it was a dead end project so he left too. Another guy took his place afterwards who is now the team lead and is trying to make DayZ what it was supposed to be and I feel sorry for the guy because the game is so far beyond redemption.
This game had a chance to gain the best reputation among all survival games and instead, it dragged itself to the dirt, achieving the "buggiest and unfinished survival game of all time".

I heard some people say that most of the work in these 3 years went into improving the engine. Well if the engine would take that much work just to give a SMALL portion of the players a solid 60 fps, then the game shouldn't have been made Early Access in the first place! Seriously, 90% of my time in DayZ playing with a fps lower than 30 with my game freezing every now and then. I wanna get started on how awful the performance of this game has been through all these 3 years but even players who haven't played DayZ know how crappy it is. If you want to know more about the performance, just read every other player's review and you'll get what it's like.


In conclusion, if you want to play this game, you must be willing to put up with hackers and glitchers, over 500 different bugs and glitches, KOS players (Kill on sight), walking over 10 kilometers a day and spending years on the game until it finally reaches Beta!


Fun fact:
I might be one of the only 10 DayZ players from the current 11,000 (which is dropping by the day) who knows you can break rocks with a pickaxe and use the stones to sharpen your axe. Why? Because everyone else is busy finding guns new glitches to kill other players. What has this game come to?


I disabled the comment section because apparently some people can't handle other opinions. If you can't cope with other players having other opinions then don't drop into the f*cking reviews section!