Early Days is a fantastic map with few flaws. The atmosphere, scale, and storytelling are incredible. It has a fair item balance, good pacing, and no unfair moments. Realistically, you can play this map on any difficulty or mode, and it should be a fair experience. The path is also clear and hard to get lost in.

I liked a lot of the environments as well as the very small details, like newspapers and computers being fully detailed and having long amounts of readable text. Radios had chatter you could listen to and get more details. One of my personal favorites was the cola "event" in which you could optionally bring cola to a group of sheltered survivors for supplies and some custom dialogue.

So with this praise, why not a 10/10? Here are the two issues I have with the map:

One, the campaign is demanding on the game's engine, and having mods is likely to crash you, and your frames are easy to drop. This is far less bad than some other demanding maps out there, but I think it's a valid issue that should be addressed. The author DOES warn about this, so credit is given there. I personally never crashed, but my players were reporting audio breaking and massive frame drops. You should be aware of what your mods are before you play this map. Don't have 200+ mods, crash, and then complain it's the author's fault.

Two, the campaign just doesn't seem destructive enough as you progress. From what I was able to tell, this campaign takes place in the United States, and it's a few days into the outbreak, and military presence is heavy, jets and helicopters fly overhead, police cars are abandoned on the streets, and dead soldiers lie with their rifles in their decaying hands, which you can take. The problem is... why is there so little rubble? I would expect the United States military not to exactly care about bombing their own cities if needed (look at The Parish), but very few buildings are damaged, and none are toppled over. The forests remain mostly green, and none are on fire; no trees are cut down. It all feels too clean for what's actually going on lore-wise. There could be reasons for this lack of chaos, but I did not see it as I went through the map. I will happily be disauded if someone can view it better than I. This is more of a complaint from me, so I'm not letting it harm the rating of this campaign much.

This is a map worthy of 5/5 stars. Just don't be surprised if you mod too much and it crashes on you for that reason. Play vanilla-esque for once if you need to; this map is worthwhile.