Ever been hacking down a tree in Minecraft and thought, “This would be a lot easier with a chainsaw”? Perhaps chainsawing through a zombie’s skull in Dead Island you thought “This is great, but what are the possibilities vis-a-vis lumberjacks?” 7 Days to Die: The Survival Horror Crafting Game has your back.
The new game from colorfully named development team The Fun Pimps promises a mishmash sandbox of elements from a broad selection of genres: first-person-shooting, roleplaying, survival horror, tower defense, and more. Similar to the recent Xbox Live hit State of Decay, 7DTD will have survivors scavenging for items like food and medicine to keep stats like strength and stamina up, but it will also allow players to gather natural resources like stone and wood to build or reinforce shelters and craft new items.
The items, of which hundreds are promised, range from the aforementioned chainsaw to pickaxes, rifles, and rocket launchers. And it looks like you’ll need that kind of arsenal: the trailer pictures a ton of zombies chasing the player through the streets of abandoned suburbs and deserted tract homes.
The settings of 7DTD will be constructed from voxels but unlike the procedurally generated landscapes of Minecraft or the recent Cube World promise to be hand-crafted. 7DTD is also distinguished in terms of its core aesthetic; expect much more realistic, high-detail environments and models in place of the blocky 8-bit look Minecraft’s made famous.
It was inevitable, we suppose. The Minecraft approach to gathering and crafting is infiltrating games across practically every genre, much the way RPG mechanics did in previous generations, when suddenly gaining experience and leveling up became central to everything from sports games to racers, puzzle games to shooters. Now that we’re (hopefully) most of the way through the initial rush of cheap Minecraft clones and knockoffs, we’re excited to see how games like 7DTD take advantage of the possibilities of the mechanics Mojang built.
You can find 7 Days to Die on Kickstarter here, and over at Steam Greenlight here.
