DayZ is a phenomenon of its own, starting out as a mod for Arma 2 getting such a big playerbase that Arma´s creators Bohemia Interactive Studio hired the man behind DayZ to make it into a standalone game. Now that game is here, somewhat. It is an early access game still in its alpha mode and the question most people are asking is if the game will ever reach beyond the promised beta in the winter. DayZ is about your own personal, tor own adventure and tale of surviving, in a world where food is scarce and the humans with guns can rule the rest in any way they want. I have during my travels in Chernarus encountered people telling shameful stories about how groups of players with guns forced them to eat rotten food naked. But this is not an article of my adventures in Chernarus or how I learned that killing is a part of who I am in an post-apocalyptic world, this is a review of the games current alpha state.
Graphics and UI
Day Z is very good looking game at the highest setting, but as with all Bohemia games it comes with a bad optimizing making it demand more of your computer than necessary, and making it very ugly and barely playable on older computers. One of the big debates about the game has also been there first choice of game engine, where they at the moment are using the RV Engine instead of their absolutely gorgeous Arma 3 engine. They have stated that they are changing to a new engine called Fusion which really is just a very modded version of the current engine. But I still have some hope that they will realize the need for Bohemia’s latest and far most powerful engine from Arma 3. It undoubtedly would make Day Z not just a more visually impressive game, but smoother in all gameplay aspects, and sharpen up the stale and boring faces which all characters now have. One of these aspects would be the UI, which is simple and yet messy. It is easy to see what you have in your backpack but moving stuff around can sometimes bug greatly making rearranging your backpack a drag.
The World
Chernarus feel very empty and this is something both positive and negative. On the positive side this creates a great post-apocalyptic atmosphere where it really feels as the worlds has gone to hell and barely encountering other players helps to creating the suspicious feeling you have of all whom you meet. It also helps create an immersive survival feeling where you can go from house to house and not finding any food, making you more and more nervous to die before even encountering another player. The downside about the emptiness is that even the fauna is scarcely found, making the travelling from village to village very monotonous and boring, with no real scenery to enjoy. There are still a lot of buildings to explore in the game, but at the moment they all sadly look the same. While some of them differ in both looks an layouts, the majority of them is more or less copy pasted over the map taking away much of the exploration feeling in the game.
Crafting
Surviving in the harsh wilderness of Chernarus requires more than just avoiding humans, killing zombies and looking for canned tuna, you will also need to craft items and other usable stuff such as a can-opener or a cooking place. You are also free to customize colors of weapons and in some cases cloth given you have the right spray-paint on you. Crafting in Day Z is extremely simple, you just drag the items together which you want to craft into something. So by dragging the white spray-paint over a rifle can make it a white rifle. In the games current state there are very few items you can craft making crafting very obsolete except for the can-opener and map. The simplicity of crafting also takes away from the realistic survival immersion of the game. I truly hope crafting takes a much bigger part and that there will be some sort of animation to crafting since it could raise the bar for the game. By leaving it at its current stage will lower the quality of the game.
Combat
We have over the years been told it requires a lot of guns and blood to enjoy zombie experiences, but as many of you already may know this is not the case with Day Z. Here you wish to stay away from both the undead and the living as much as possible as both can lead to a certain death early on in your adventure. You will still encounter both living and undead and you will have to endure the extremely clumsy controls for combat which really lowers the quality of the game several steps. It feels slow in a bad way, it lags when moving and trying to hit (I did test it on several high end computers just in case.), the inventory is just plain bad and it really feels like a drag when you have to fight and not for the scary reasons. I do hope combat gets improved before the game enters beta.
The Future
Since Day Z still is in an early alpha mode and hopefully will enter into beta this winter, what we have today in the game whether good or bad, can easily change until its future release. The plan for the future is to implement vehicles in which the players can traverse the huge island of Chernarus. As well as introduce a wide variety of animal life so that the world feels more alive. They also plan on making it possible for players to create their own constructions and safe havens. While all this sounds great it is still very far away, and with Sony’s H1Z1 approaching much faster with almost identical features and looks, Bohemia Interactive and Dean Hall will have to push a lot harder for this to be a good final product. While DayZ has huge potential I would not recommend buying it in its current state given how it lacks in almost all areas now given that it is in Alpha. But I will recommend you to keep a close eye on the game and when they start implementing more stuff at a faster pace it might be something you should consider adding to your game library.
Related: DayZ, Review, Sandbox, Survival