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Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 757.0 hrs on record (278.5 hrs at review time)
Posted: 24 Jul, 2022 @ 8:20am
Updated: 24 Jul, 2022 @ 12:43pm

Early Access Review
Project Zomboid is a post-apocalyptic zombie and rpg survival game playable in both single player and co-op/multiplayer telling the story of your death once a strange virus spread through Knox Country in the 90s .
To survive you will have to find what to eat, what to dress, protect yourself and of course, what to re-kill a few tens of thousands of zombies scattered across the region.
For this evaluation, it's simple : positive / negative point

Let's start with the negatives
  • You are alone in the world, literally... There are no other survivors in the game unless you play with other people, it reinforces the oppressive side of the game, if something bad happens to you, you cannot count only on you, however... Well, it lacks life.
  • It's an extremely frustrating game at times, I'll take a personal example: You survived 6 months, you found a fairly quiet place where you could farm, reinforce the area, etc., and there: you see a zombie alone. You decided to go kill him (because these monsters there are like cockroaches, when there is one, there are others) but you are out of luck, your weapon breaks because it is too worn and you find yourself battling multiple zombies and being surrounded. You quickly understand the situation you are soon dead. No escape possible and you will be angry when you have just lost more than fifty hours of games, which is quite frustrating.
  • I decided to put the graphics in the negative points but for only one reason which is not strictly speaking graphic: you cannot change the angle of view, which means that you cannot see certain hidden objects behind a wall, apart from this slight detail, the graphics since the B41 update are pretty good, certainly not worthy of a triple A, but for PZ, that's not what we're looking for.
  • The lack of challenges and objectives, I find it a shame that there are no more proposed challenges and/or objectives, and if we count the fact that there is no real goal apart from "surviving" and you can quickly wonder what to do when you have a quiet corner and enough food to survive a whole year (spoiler alert: (spoiler alert : It almost never happens

Good points
  • The game itself has an almost infinite replayability, as soon as you die, you create a new game and presto! We start again.
  • The map is huge (several real hours to cross one side of the map)
  • You can customize your game as you wish in sandbox mode, whether it's modifying the zombies (their speed, their resistance, their strength, their numbers, etc.) modifying your character (the ease or not of increasing levels in the different fields [agriculture, carpentry, cooking and others]) or even the modification of the world (how is the virus transmitted? How quickly will the plants grow? After how long does it take? will there be more electricity and running water? etc)
  • Each game will be almost unique: not the same place of appearance if you take the same city. You can even choose character traits and a job for your character: if he is fast, loud, quiet, depressive, if he can cook or not, if he was a soldier, a firefighter, a doctor and others.
  • Events, if you activate them, will make your game more immersive but dangerous. There are three types of events: events happening during the day (gunshot, someone screaming, etc.) and at night (a bad dream that will wake you up, a zombie that broke into your house while you were sleeping, etc) there is also "the sadistic director of the AI", this event consists of making a helicopter appear which will look for you and if it does not find you, it will leave. All events (without exception) make noise so be careful.

Conclusion
I will therefore give a rating at this stage of the evaluation: This game is a little nugget in the post-apo zombie survival style and deserves its price (~15€ at the time I wrote the evaluation) as well as a good 16/20. However, one detail changes the situation:

The community

Indeed, the game has the workshop which allows you to create an infinite number of mods to add to the game. Some mods even add NPC survivors. Not to mention the number of cities created by the community, you can fill the map with new cities to explore and therefore new dangers.
Install mods to help you survive by adding realism, such as hunting, or install other mods to add interfaces that will break the "immersion" but make your life easier.

But in any case, you will have to choose your style of survival in a world where the dead reign supreme:
Are you more stealthy at trapping zombies, or do you prefer to swoop in and rely on luck so none bite you?
The choice is yours, but don't forget one detail:

What you hear, the undead will hear too, and he usually doesn't walk around alone...

Good luck surviving my friend.
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