Recent reviews by Jan ジャン

A pixel tank costs 1/6 of minimum wage

Some people claim that this game will never be finished and it has been in beta since 2013, I don't understand where do they come from. I have around 300 hours around the time of this review and I haven't seen at least a good 30 to 40 percent of game mechanics yet. I haven't done any advanced carpentry, farming or even beginner metalworking or electronics. Even on a character that I put 80 hours in, and fought zombies a lot, I am still at level 6 on melee skills. The game has more content than any other game I've played, by a huge margin. Developers could simply say "Hey it's not beta anymore" and it would be completely valid.

- Incredibly immersive atmosphere: gigantic map that takes a few real life hours to travel ON A CAR. I personally haven't seen all of the places yet. The game takes place in 1992 Kentucky, in game map is almost a copy of how Kentucky looks like in real life.
- Kino soundtrack: Obviously not "epic" as Dark Souls boss soundtracks or Nier soundtracks, but almost on par with them. Clock ticking when you are constructing stuff, creepy music at night, energetic music when fighting zombies. The music always matches what you are doing, and they are really well done. Fits the gloomy atmosphere perfectly.
- Detailed moodle system: You can't just eat dog food to survive, or stay around tens of dead bodies, or stay inside reading books all day long. Your character has actual emotions, he gets tired, exhausted, depressed, anxious. You would have to act like how you exactly would act if this game was real, to survive.
- Well made animations: Build 41 animations are really well done with emphasis on realism. If a zombie gets a hold on you, you struggle to get him off of you, which depends on your strenght, exhaustion levels and so on. Laceration on your leg? Your character will walk differently, and slower. The weapon attack animations also get faster as you level them up. Every item consuming has an animation, from drinking to eating to constructing walls to painting them to planting crops.
- Realistic character building . You can't be good at everything. A character that is strong, athletic and good with weapons struggles to learn advanced carpentry or farming. You pick your traits carefully and plan your game ahead.
- Sandbox mode: Sprinter zombies? Zombies that can open doors? Millions of really weak zombies? Whatever you can imagine, can be done in sandbox, which significantly increases replayability.
- Most realistic zombie game on Steam as of now: This is the biggest plus I can say without giving any spoilers. The things I go through with my characters really feels so realistic, I would have absolutely done the same things in real life, and everything would go exactly the same. There is no single gimmicky or game balancing mechanic. It's all realism. One bite and your 200 hours character is gone forever. Successfully sneaking through hordes to get to the back door of a warehouse, only to hear an alarm sound coming, I swear I haven't panicked that much when playing Amnesia or Outlast. You sprint as if your life depends on it, which it does. There are so many hidden game mechanics that you aren't directly aware of such as getting protein in your diet to increase strength gains, nightmares, wind and smell etc. My single advice for anyone playing this for the first time would be: Just do what you exactly would do in a real life zombie apocalypse, and it will work.
- No winning, just prolonging the inevitable: Everytime you open the game, you will be greeted with the message "This is how you died." There isn't a way to win Project Zomboid, you just prolong your death a bit more. Your deaths will always and always be caused by your own mistakes. My longest surviving character, 7 months in, died because I got cocky. I was fishing in the Westpoint River when I saw a loner, having killed more than 3000 zombies at that point I thought I could kill him by pushing him to the ground, then stomping his head. I missed my stomp and he took a chunk off of my left leg. This isn't a game you play to relax, every minute, every house looting, every zombie clearing is tense as it gets.

- Really steep learning curve: Your first 5 to 10 characters won't make it past a week, because the combat is really unforgiving and figuring out how to sneak past zombies isn't exactly clear. Knowing when to run and when to sneak gets some time to learn. The game also never gives you clear numbers for weapon damage, infection or status effects. You are either hungry, or not. You can be peckish or very hungry, but you won't know the exact amount of food to eat. At the start, you will have to do a lot of guesswork. A tip for new players is that you can outrun hordes simply by walking in opposite direction. You don't need to run unless you are being circled. Don't panic, use your head.
- Reverse difficulty as time goes on: The hardest part of the game are at the beginning, when you can barely swing a weapon, and have a pan to defend yourself with little to no food. With my fighter characters, I can reliably take on 20 zombie hordes if I seperate them carefully, and with good weapons. At the start however, even 3 zombies might kill you. There are no special zombies or "bosses". Every enemy is a standart zombie, they get weaker as time goes on due to cold and starving, whereas you get stronger. So mid to late game can get a little boring depending on where your base is.

Overall conclusion It's a must buy game if you are tired of all those "craft, blocks, zombies" games that are utter trash and just a copy paste of each other. The single handedly most realistic zombie with so many things to do and so many things to learn about. Not as content rich as Catacylsm Dark Days Ahead, but this game as graphics so there is that.

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