Preview: Night of the Dead

Preview: Night of the Dead

Are you a zombie apocalypse kind of guy/girl? Do you like crafting and hunting for food? Even building death traps for incoming hoards of zombies? Sounds good? Search no further! Night of the dead is a survival, open-world game developed and published by Jacktostudios. I struggled with this game at the beginning since I didn’t know how to play. But after reading a guide, it went way better. That’s why I will also tell you a little about the game. Are you willing to read a little to experience something extraordinary? If the answer is yes, continue reading.

About the game

You start in the middle of nowhere, holding only a pocket knife. There is a little quest in the upper left corner. However, in my opinion, this lacks information. It never tells you how you re-use the things you build. It tells you to make certain things, but not what for. Let me tell you what the goal is here. You need to farm food and materials to build a safe house first so you have a safe place. This requires quite some farming since it takes a while to cut down a tree. After that,  you need to build traps to defend yourself and kill the waves of zombies that come every night.

What we liked

If you like crafting while surviving, this is your game. There is so much to make! Of course, you start with the standard stuff like a bow. But later on, there are even flamethrowers (!!!) and a bunch of traps. But there are also just regular baseball bats or two-handed swords for the melee playstyle. However, the further you get, the less melee you’ll be since the waves get larger and larger in the evening. Like I mentioned above, I had a tough start with this game. I didn’t know the goal and didn’t get any waves in the evening. I don’t know if this is a bug, but I got waves of zombies after starting over. And this makes it so much more exciting. I love the combat and the different types of zombies there are. Some are fast, some are tanky, and some even explode and set things on fire. I also like the visuals and hunting for food with my bow. (I love bows ever since I played Tomb Raider with that excellent looking compound bow).

What could still use some work

They mentioned after the last patch, there might be some problems, and since I started my game before the upgrade, it could go wrong. So maybe that’s why I didn’t get any waves in the nights, but of course, I would like to see this fixed, so others don’t have to restart. Otherwise, I really would recommend putting more effort into the tutorial. Not saying it sucks, but some more info would be appreciated. Or give us an intro or some gameplay of what is about to come maybe. Show us how important those traps are. I needed to search for a guide to understand what the hell was going on. Others might not want to do that. They will drop the game because of a lack of information and I really think that would be a shame since this game is so good when you grasp what to do.

Also, I want to mention that the game starts very dark, even during the day. I would recommend you change the gamma in settings to see something if you look around. I get that you want a creepy vibe, but I need to see the stuff I need to pick up and loot.

In conclusion

If you don’t mind a somewhat questionable start to the game, not knowing what to do (I hope I made that a little more clear above), it is an enjoyable game. It’s already so good for being in Early Access. I needed to make sure it was in Early Access because I wasn’t sure after playing. Only had some trouble in the start but after restarting and reading a guide it was an absolute blast playing the game. There is a lot of farming for materials and some stuff, like cutting a tree, takes quite some time. But if you have the patience for the first hour it will get so much better since the waves are such fun. I enjoyed this game but I sincerely hope they will make it easier to understand the game at the start.