The phrase "zombie survival game" tends to produce an innate feeling of repulsion from a lot of people familiar the video game industry. It's not, as one would expect, the result of any of those individual terms; zombies are a force to be reckoned with in movies and television, and survival games have their own unique appeal in the video game market. The genre has become extremely commonplace ever since the arrival of the DayZ zombie survival mod for Arma II, with numerous developers trying to replicate the same appeal.
But as they say, lightning never strikes twice in the same location. Many installments of the zombie survival genre have long fallen flat, abandoned by developers too disenfranchised to care about the state of their products. Few ever even left early access, though there's still a couple bastions of undead entertainment grimly chugging along.
via 7daystodie.com
Such is the case with 7 Days to Die, which, to the developers' credit, is actually a fairly impressive product capable of standing alone in the genre. The latest update for the game, Alpha 16, officially released recently, and the patch notes alone could fill a short novel; the page is over 63,000 characters long!
As for the content itself, the primary features of the update include a distant rendering system that allows players to render far areas without severe framerate trouble, dozens of new buildings, a variety of improvements to the late game stages, and a lot more. There's electricity, there's new zombies, there's painting; it really seems as though the developers of 7 Days to Die went above and beyond in the game's latest update, providing a wealth of content and improvements far beyond what could be expected from an early access game.
via 7daystodie.com
Of course, every big update comes with an equally high amount of bugs. Players can probably expect numerous hotfixes over the next couple months in order to address the unfortunate side effects.
In the meantime, check out the official blog post to read over the patch notes yourself. Just make sure you're comfortable first; they are very long.
7 Days to Die is available for purchase for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC for $24.99.
