The framerates collapse and rise again, zombie-like.
Perhaps I would have enjoyed myself more if the world still had some beauty to counterbalance its sorrows. There are places, such as the desert's expanses of yucca and prickly pear, where 7 Days to Die achieves a degree of realistic detail, but on the whole the world that unfolds on the Xbox One looks ancient and unappealing. Fog obscures distances everywhere, limiting views to a few hundred yards at best. Some of the maps, particularly those in the randomized worlds, look like rough drafts that accidentally made it from a developer's trash folder and into the final release. All the while the framerates collapse and rise again, zombie-like, the action freezes completely during the most mundane tasks, and the multiplayer maps sometimes shut down entirely without warning. I got the most fun out of 7 Days to Die, I think, just from guessing when the next glitch would pop up. I usually didn't have to wait long. It's the kind of thing you'd expect to find on a PC game on Steam's Early Access.So it should come as no surprise that even with 7 Days to Die's shiny, disclaimer-free boxed copies for the PS4 and Xbox One, that's essentially what it is. It's been around for PC since 2013 on Steam, and there it's still listed as Early Access and its patches still come out labeled as "alphas." Bug sweeps and improvements to graphics have made the PC version decent enough, at least, but the console version plays like an alpha of that alpha.“
Why do I have to use the thumbsticks like a mouse pointer in order to select things in the menus?
Even the most basic concessions to console controls have been overlooked. Why, for instance, do I have to use the thumbsticks like a mouse pointer in order to select things in the menus? Other, similar interface issues constantly muddle the experience, constantly reminding me I’m not using the right tool for this job. The action – such as it is – works well enough, but fiddling with menus usually presents a greater struggle than offing the zombies.“
Mind you, the action only works sort of well when you graduate to using weapons like bows and arrows or guns — when it's just punching rocks or swinging axes, it's barely better than Minecraft’s rudimentary bludgeoning. It’s hard to tell if you’re fighting a zombie or harvesting it. Sometimes the zombies continue to stand there wiggling after you've shot them full of arrows, making it hard to tell if they're still "alive" or just glitched.To be clear, there's a decent game under all of this cruft that PC players have enjoyed for years, it’s just that that average-at-best game has been completely crippled by a bad console port. When I closed my eyes and imagined controls that weren’t a trainwreck, I found myself pulled in by the idea that almost everything in the world can be broken down and used to craft something else, and the approach encourages a great deal of experimentation that's appropriate for a setting focused on working with what you have. (It was experimentation, in fact, that led me to start punching rocks with my fists to get my first stones; the tutorial quests say nothing about that.)
There's also a Minecraft-style Creative mode that turns off the zombie hordes and lets you focus solely on building, although I found it most useful for figuring out the basics without worrying about a yet another jerkily animated, copy-pasted zombie interrupting my creative reveries. Again, it's best to enjoy this with friends, and there's even a splitscreen local co-op mode if you don't relish the idea of joining the multiplayer maps where you may not even see another person. And, if you do, they'll probably want to kill you for your stuff anyway.
