Its been a while since alpha 18 and the new combat system was introduced, honestly the game isnt bad now. a lot of the imbalances across the weapon tiers have been adjusted. guns especially went from being really underpowered and a waste of time, to the powerhouses and best zombie killing tool you have access too. which is how it should be.

the game is a bit slow to learn, but its got a lot to do now, after 700 hours i only really have a few complaints.

1: the XP system is still absurdly slow. leveling up with default settings takes so painfully long that you'll usually end up being scrapped for skills you WANT because almost all your points go into skills you need. ie: base building skills, some form of healing skill (regen, looting, stealth, or crafting), and tool/weapon skills. throughout the earlier levels you end up in the bottleneck where you cant really take anything that sounds fun or cool because you'll almost immedietly get punished for not having healing, or not having enough damage, or putting your entire base progression on hold. overall the system is better than A16 and prior.

and 2: multiplayer is mostly functional until you introduce any significant ammount of lag. again theres been many improvements over the years and laggy multiplayer is playable now without instantly feeling cheated all the time. melee fighting is a pretty important part of 7days. and dodging zombies attacks becomes very important on higher difficulties where zombies do 20/40 or 25/50 damage a hit for light and heavy zombies respectively. zombies also have a significant chance to stun or bleed you. as the host you can dodge and weave through zombies swings and, with a bit of practice, can avoid almost all hits from a single zombie if your paying attention. but as a client with 300 ping. the zombie will pretty frequently hit you well outside of their range and consistently finish their attack if you manage to stun them mid-animation. making dodging more based on luck and chance than anything.

in case someone actually reads this, my suggested fix for the lag would be to make zombies change to a client controlled object once they are engaged by a player. then the client sends the zombies info to the server to relay to other players. this would fix both the zombies feeling cheaty and wierd as a client, and from a 3rd party perspective the fight would look more natural because the player and zombie data are both comming from the same instance of the game.

other than those 2 things, the game has really come a long way over the years. im glad to see that in alpha 19 the traders are going to get re-worked slightly to be more functional.